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Total Members Voted: 66

[Loud Whispers]

Oh yeah, there's also the desire for cake and the friendship of cubes. But that's a minor issue.

[Flying Dice]

I hear that if you start playing GTA with the desire to run over pedestrians, you'll stop wanting to after a couple hours. Mostly out of sheer relief that real cars don't handle that badly.

[Squul]

The article drops that title but fails to follow through. And in fact I can't really tell whether he's bashing ascii graphics or praising them.

I don't see the piece really basing anything really.  Like someone said earlier it has a "thought of the day" feel.  Where he mentions graphics not dictating whether or not a game is good is something I can definitely agree with.  So I don't think its really bashing or praising either genre.  But it favors both in my opinion.

I'm not sure I take seriously an article where, near the top, a MUD client is given the same blame for grinding a machine to a halt as a Youtube 'tab'.

If hes doing Ubuntu and Windows then it could have just been a light self-joke leading into a comparison.  I can't run DF with anything...wait can anyone run other stuff with DF?

Wait, I thought we were all crazy, just not the bad kind.

Yea who ever said insanity was a bad thing! lol

But is it that DF makes people crazy (and keeps them that way after they stop playing), or is it that people who enjoy games like DF tend to be crazy, and crazy tends to attract crazy?

There's the debate!  I vote a little bit of both.  I think we all get super creative with ASCII like the writer said.  The last line kind of hinted that maybe it can be overkill more to ourselves but even that doesn't come off as being put in a bad light.  Figure the whole thing was about the tireless mass of mad-scientist minded players of these kinds of games being almost genius actually..holy shit we're geniuses!

[Frumple]

... some of us really don't get particularly creative with imagining ASCII. Me, I'm having my @ sign murder alphanumerics or whathaveyou. Unicode genocide.

[Trif]

I disapprove of the lack of a "Banana!" option in this poll.

[Flying Dice]

If hes doing Ubuntu and Windows then it could have just been a light self-joke leading into a comparison.  I can't run DF with anything...wait can anyone run other stuff with DF?

I usually had a few browser tabs open, and maybe a music player or MSWord as well, while running DF.

But is it that DF makes people crazy (and keeps them that way after they stop playing), or is it that people who enjoy games like DF tend to be crazy, and crazy tends to attract crazy?

There's the debate!  I vote a little bit of both.  I think we all get super creative with ASCII like the writer said.  The last line kind of hinted that maybe it can be overkill more to ourselves but even that doesn't come off as being put in a bad light.  Figure the whole thing was about the tireless mass of mad-scientist minded players of these kinds of games being almost genius actually..holy shit we're geniuses!

That wasn't really a serious question. Games (like all media) don't cause significant long-term changes in a person who isn't already unstable and tending towards further instability. Psychological research can show some degree of causation between exposure to violent media and short-term violent behavior (with context cues related to the subject of the medium in question) in young children, but that's about it.

[katana]

No, but the insane people stick around long enough to learn how to play.

[dei]

I don't think creativity promotes insanity, but then again sanity is suggestive and I haven't thought of myself as sane for most of my life. That is due to both nature and nuture however and is somewhat irrelevant.

I glimpsed at the article and after several minutes of typing out a reply realized that I have nothing nice to say about the author of the article. So here is a picture of a cat made of pizza.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Starver]

wait can anyone run other stuff with DF?

I don't doubt they can.

I'm currently 'grinding'[1] an Adventurer in DF on a home machine where (for some reason[2]) it's between 3 minutes and 5 minutes between movement or 'tick-worthy' action (moving the "look" or "throw" cursor around is normal speed, actually throwing something means the long pause before "I have control again" the same as with moving to an adjacent tile), as the nominal "100 (40)"-ish FPS indication drops down to "0 (0)" until suddenly it zooms to "400 (??)"-ish (before throttling back to the cap of 100 again) and then I'm back in the room.  DF is rushing it's little legs off (and the case/CPU fan noise goes up a notch or two, although not as high as it could go) and certainly doing something.

But (and with no sign that this slows down DF's meditations at all) I've been able to both watch video files and even render 3D scenes (the former might be mitigated by the graphics card, the latter won't be) without noticeable slowdown from when I don't have DF running.  On a single-core processor[3].  As it's an off-line machine, I haven't tried connecting it up to Youtube and seeing if that's affected.


However, the comparison was between Youtube video playing and a telnet session, and the latter is far less intensive of both network connection (at least while Youtube buffers as quickly as it can) and console power, is all I was saying.  And far less (internally) than DF in unpaused Fortress mode, as well.


Just to make what I was saying a bit clearer.  (And it's been a few versions since I've personally noticed DF prevent any other program progressing accordingly, in the background, as well as in the foreground when DF is backgrounded, though I have seen some performance hit.)

here is a picture of a cat made of pizza.

That's not just a cat made of pizza.  It's a cat made of pizza IN SPACE!!!!


[1] Not as in "spamming skill-increasing stuff", although I am sneaking (but already Legendary at <foo>/2000, by now, and only sneaking to avoid too much conflict with aggressive wildlife, not to train)

[2] I'm speculating it's because of too much wildlife, possibly even unseen cavernlife (every now and then I've had "The Reacher is no longer enraged" notifications), moving around in the immediate vicinity and causing a lot of between-turn calculations to take place.  Either that or somewhere just out of sight there's a worldgen glitch with massive liquid movements happening (but I'm getting no cave-in messages).  Either way, I'm hoping that when I've scoured this location (a cave that had a now ex-werebeast, and a bandit camp with a now ex-bandit leader (probably killed by the werebeast, as with most of the rest of the bandits) for valuables I can walk away from the location and get my FPS back again.  Or find out what's causing it, perhaps, and deal with it if it's yet more packs of dingoes hogging the movements calculator.  (I'm rather stocked up on dingo meat, already.)

[3] Maybe it's XP's multitasking priorities gone awry, but it doesn't appreciably lag for any other aspect of DF, just this one Adventurer that I don't really want to abandon if I can help it.

[MagmaMcFry]

The only reason these games seem to have more insanity is, unlike a large number of games nowadays, they ALLOW it. If you don't allow people to kill children in games, they won't. If you do, they will, seems to me as simple as that.

QFT

[10ebbor10]

The only reason these games seem to have more insanity is, unlike a large number of games nowadays, they ALLOW it. If you don't allow people to kill children in games, they won't. If you do, they will, seems to me as simple as that.

Reminds me of a certain work of art. It was made from an aquarium(Including fish), a blender, and a button.

Killed around 20 fish in 2 days.

[Loud Whispers]

The only reason these games seem to have more insanity is, unlike a large number of games nowadays, they ALLOW it. If you don't allow people to kill children in games, they won't. If you do, they will, seems to me as simple as that.

Hence fallout.

A better example would be Fish tycoon. It was simple, you had fish, you had a store and you had some fun tools. I managed to get a breeding pair of a magic fish of fertility. The resulting mess was a fishplosion of baby fish everywhere.
Many funs were had. One fish I kept putting in and out of suspended animation, freezing, unfreezing. It was immortal. I never allowed it to die. Many were scrapped or sold away to make room for the next generation of super fish. Growth hormones, snails, pagodas. All were employed in the pursuit of science.
Science of the fish.

[The Darkling Wolf]

I'm beginning to think that they do cause insanity in humans.
Good thing I'm an aeroplane.

[MagmaMcFry]

I think there are much too few games that allow you to be insane.

[Muz]

I'm going to try and find examples in 10 minutes.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Jason lay awake in his bed, thinking about his life. He could tell it was going to end soon, he could feel it in his old aching bones. He rubs his eyes with his hands, and looks around, all the painting, all the gold and all the jewels, all of them illgotten goods, stolen or bought with money stolen from others, some even bought from the death of those they were trying to save. Then he got out of bed and went to the bathroom, looking at himself in the mirror. He didn't look like he did 22 years ago when he founded the LPS, he looked more rugged, older, more worn, maybe even more handsome, but he looked at himself like some sort of monster for the first time. He looked back to his past, how it started, a 16 year him breaking into the hoses of the rich. Once he was found out while robbing, he was about to call the police, but he shot the person, he didn't know if it was a man or a woman, he just ran before somebody came to check the place after the gunshot. It was then he realized that America was in trouble, it was towns were run by guard forces the acted like they were martial law, everybody had to watch what they said or risk death, give birth to children they didn't want, money was being poured into the military, guns were anywhere and everywhere, and innocent children were forced to work slave labor, and people were forced to work for scraps to get away from their old place of home. He knew it needed change, but it took him two years to notice he WAS the change that it needed, he formed the LCS, and slowly it grew, helping some, but never enough to make a real change, cuasing more trouble than help, and he just noticed it now. He sat down at his desk, and wrote out his final will, leaving everything the LPS, then went back to bed, not waking up the next mourning, and dying in his sleep, but in his sleep, he made peace in a dream. Messiah leading the LCS to victory, leading America into a liberal future, a better future, and he was at peace before he died, and for the first time in a very long time, he smiled, and he died with that smile on his face.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 If you are at C+ Labor Laws, Child Workers are the best. Otherwise, use Hippies. Assign them to play street music. As soon as you can, buy them guitars. You will make a lot of money.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

M4 do slightly less damage, but is more precise.
At skill 10, an M16/AK47 will do an average of 323.055 damage and an M4 will do 307.92 damage. At skill 0 however, the M4 will do 156.12 damage compared to 140.805 for the M16. I do not know when the M16 become more efficient.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I thus propose the following system:


Poop:

Just like a dwarf needs to eat or drink, a dwarf will need to poop. Excrement will be handled as an item and cannot be traded.

When a fortress is abandoned, EXCREMENT WILL STAY IN THE EXACT SAME PLACE. The last thing anyone wants is turds strewn all over the fortress for no adequately explained reason.


Latrines:

A latrine will have to be built over an open space, and have a room designated from it(pooping in public? Hell no). When used by a dwarf, excrement will be deposited on the tile below the latrine.

In a normal latrine, the feces will eventually rot away by itself, generating miasma(disgusting the unlucky dwarf inside). In a latrine over magma, the feces will simply burn away. In a latrine over water, the feces will dissapear, turning the water into sewage water the same way blood disperses in water(feces will not dissapear in water that has already been turned into sewage water, so the water must be kept running).


Chamberpots:

You may also use chamberpots, which are built on top of a normal floor. When a dwarf poops in a chamberpot, excrement will be stored in the chamberpot itself, the same way items are stored in coffins. A chamberpot with 5 or more feces in it will be unusable.

For the purpose of emptying the chamberpot, a dwarf designated with the 'gong farmer' labor will pick up a gong bucket(using the same bucket dwarves use to supply the wounded would be baaaad), and use it to empty the chamberpot, dumping the feces in a designated sewage dump zone(which may be a landfill or an open space over water/magma). The gong farmer will get an unhappy thought from having to dump poop initially, but will get used to it just like how military dwarves get used to death.


No toilet:

Without a toilet, your dwarves will poop outdoors, preferably in a shrub. They will get a minor unhappy thought from this. I would propose that they poop in any open space over water/magma, but there are just too many potential complications.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Yeah they are bombing me once a week or so now.  I have to hit the police station every fortnight or so to keep them down.  About to let my entire organisation get processed i think.  I finally hit that point where you have so many total noobs with M16's that you one-shot the national guard seiges...it all got more annoying than fun suddenly.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Given the non-trivial effect this has on dwarven attributes, I think that this is a valid method for a "Dwarven Super-Soldier Program".  All you need to do is drop items on a dwarf 2,000 times, and they should be "Basically Unbreakable".  Hrrm...2,000 per dwarf could go a little bit slow.
Given how labor intensive dropping small items one at a time is, I think I might see if I can use mass-dumping via minecarts to industrialize the process.  Alternately, just ready batches of items on top of a hatch ready to be dropped when a soldier comes by, since I don't actually know how to use minecarts yet.

Using this to train super-soldiers will involve a lot of hauling and labor on the part of other dwarves, and can only be targeted at one dwarf at a time, which limits it.  It DOES have one advantage over other attribute-boosting methods that I know of: It has absolutely no effect on the profession of the Dwarf.  Using screw-pumps as a "gym" will eventually give you a legendary pump operator, but this will only train Armor User, and a little bit of Dodging and Fighting.  It also boosts attributes relative to other skills much more so than say a danger room which can give you a Legendary Axedwarf who's still "flimsy".

Post your thoughts and or ideas on how to "industrialize" this training method to yield a group of super-tough soldiers.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 how feasible would it be to somehow switch off migrant waves and start a fortress, with the only population increase coming from your original seven dwarves interbreeding?

Hmm... this would make a good forum game.