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[EagleV]

That is not the problem. The problem is that it requires tools, namely a computer, before I can even start using it. Once I do I can crank out very varied software.

First of all, I agree with Haika. The rules are not intended for computer programmer characters.
"You can get creative with these, keep in mind that the source material you use should be rather common."

You can not use your computer to make, for instance, CD's with varied software.
"You must use at least one item to create something"
"You can create anything [...] as long as you use a source item to make it."

You can't keep using your computer to crank out more and more software. That would fall under 'making something from nothing'. I know it makes little sense from a realism perspective, but it does when you look at the game rules.

What you can do is crafting a 'computer which has tetris' from a 'computer' and then crafting a 'computer which has pacman and tetris' from a 'computer which has tetris'. That would make the software part of the computer, and not a seperate item, and would be fine by me. Note that critical failures on this, however, will destroy the computer, as they do with all source materials.

I don't know if that sounds clear to you, I tend to make my explanations unneededly elaborate. Here's a quick scheme:

Code: [Select]

Computer ┬> Computer
         └> Tetrisis bad (it makes two items from one), while:

Code: [Select]

Computer ─> Computer with Tetrisis okay (it makes one item from another).

[Ochita]

Arg, this time, just raise a slab of rock, and take that.

[Armok]

oh.

So what shuld I do then, just quit the game?

[evilcherry]

Making electronics which software is in its hardware seems good for me. Others might need automated controls which is definitely in your sphere, too.

[Taricus]

Well, you could program my steel man so that he's more intelligent (Not too far though)

[Armok]

If you lend me him or some way for me to make a data storage it can read I will. The data storage one might be better since then I can make multiple alternative programs and have them compatible with other hardware as well.

Does your bot have a reader for wax rolls?

[Taricus]

You'll probably have to make that...

[Haika]

Ok, here is how I would think a programmer needs to work in a game like this:

First off, your 'tool' should be your powers and your brain. I'm not sure how Eagle will work this, but in the other games, you'd invoke your powers, and be surrounded by computer screens, with a glowing keyboard appearing under your fingertips. IE: Washu from the anime Tenchi


Then, within the rules of the game you need a source material. This will be your 'disk'. Here is where you need to be creative, from a bar of metal you press and etch with a power-based laser, to a crystal filled with the programming ala Goa'uld from stargate.

Once you have /something/ to create your disk, you action would be to specify what you want to program on it. Be it a game, an operating system, a program to run a magic kitchen that makes cheese... whatever.

Also, don't worry too much about how you create your item, that's Eagle's job. All you need to state is what you are making, and what source material you are using. It could be as simple as 'I Program [optional descriptive word] using [base material/s]

Remember that the point of the game is to 'make' something and gain influence from it. You don't need to be useful in what you make, you don't need to help others, or try and give yourself an advantage, you don't need hardware that uses your software. Making a paperweight will still get you influence when you put it in the Gallery or Group Storage.

[Ochita]

Yeah, I mean, now that no-one wants my lobster, I'm going to cook it, even though that isn't my forte..

I just need some other materials, but as there is nothing to eat here, Im getting a slab of rock, and then engraving it, and other stuff.

[Armok]

Ooooh! Good idea, thanks!

Yea, I'll use that from now on.

Idea! This turn's action: I'll use that intangible power thing to program an operating system for my powers for all that screen displaying and glowing keyboards and stuff. It'll appear like a glowing sign on it's owners forehead at most times, but at a word of power all those screens and keyboards and stuff appear. It takes it's power from whatever magic power the owner has, which in the case of us creators means being able to automate the direction of creating to do tedious and fast things like etching binary data onto an object. There is a command from inside the interface to transfer ownership to someone else, who must be a willing recipient. The actual computing power and such is "hijacked" from the owners brain, which means you can't store long term more than you can memorize, hence the plot convenient need for random external objects to store data on. If my crafting roll is good enough for it other features might be uploading and downloading content from memories.

[evilcherry]

Sorry for not posting a turn.

Collect the branches.

[Haika]

Ooooh! Good idea, thanks!

Yea, I'll use that from now on.

Idea! This turn's action: I'll use that intangible power thing to program an operating system for my powers for all that screen displaying and glowing keyboards and stuff. It'll appear like a glowing sign on it's owners forehead at most times, but at a word of power all those screens and keyboards and stuff appear. It takes it's power from whatever magic power the owner has, which in the case of us creators means being able to automate the direction of creating to do tedious and fast things like etching binary data onto an object. There is a command from inside the interface to transfer ownership to someone else, who must be a willing recipient. The actual computing power and such is "hijacked" from the owners brain, which means you can't store long term more than you can memorize, hence the plot convenient need for random external objects to store data on. If my crafting roll is good enough for it other features might be uploading and downloading content from memories.

I think you kinda missed the point here. You CANNOT make something from Nothing. The computer thing is only a tool to make something with, you need some sort of physical object to hold your code. And besides, your powers should be such that it can do whatever you want, so all that stuff you said, it can already do. You don't need to program your powers to do something like that.

[EagleV]

Spoiler: Some discussion stuff (click to show/hide)

Ooooh! Good idea, thanks!

Yea, I'll use that from now on.

Idea! This turn's action: I'll use that intangible power thing to program an operating system for my powers for all that screen displaying and glowing keyboards and stuff. It'll appear like a glowing sign on it's owners forehead at most times, but at a word of power all those screens and keyboards and stuff appear. It takes it's power from whatever magic power the owner has, which in the case of us creators means being able to automate the direction of creating to do tedious and fast things like etching binary data onto an object. There is a command from inside the interface to transfer ownership to someone else, who must be a willing recipient. The actual computing power and such is "hijacked" from the owners brain, which means you can't store long term more than you can memorize, hence the plot convenient need for random external objects to store data on. If my crafting roll is good enough for it other features might be uploading and downloading content from memories.

I think you kinda missed the point here. You CANNOT make something from Nothing. The computer thing is only a tool to make something with, you need some sort of physical object to hold your code. And besides, your powers should be such that it can do whatever you want, so all that stuff you said, it can already do. You don't need to program your powers to do something like that.

I don't think Armok is trying to make something from nothing. He is making a computer from that weird power vial, and then when he makes programs (using his computer as part of the fluff), he will use other objects (like his cylinders) as data storage devices, effectively changing them into a physical program disk.

World difficulty: 72
As the lights go back to normal and the viewing ports open, you see a desolate landscape. A gray world, with pools of a black fluid scattered over the landscape, and plants that exist of thousands of tiny branches perpendicular to one thick, heavy trunk.

Gather some of the branches, using steelman as a porter.

Attempt: 62
Quality: 15
Amount: 72 (6)
You decide to use Steel Man to carry stuff for now, and load him up with various axes and saws. On the first tree, you notice there are only a few branches within reach, so you decide to climb up first and work your way down, to gather as many as possible. A few meter above the surface, however, one of the branches you are standing on snaps with a dry crack and you find yourself back on the floor. Your back hurts as hell, almost as if it has been broken - which, you guess, could actually be the case. You apply some magic to releave the pain and start the mending process, while Steel Man gathers some of the branches you took with you when you fell. You spend the rest of the day sleeping, letting your body heal, while outside the planet gets hotter and hotter.
+6 Alien Branches (I: 3)
+31 Gathering XP

Gather some of the sap

Attempt: 71
Quality: 65
Quantity: 65 (1)
Instead of trying to cut down a whole tree, you decide to make a tiny hole in it. You take a set of syringes with variously sized needles with you, and try them all. The bigger ones are very difficult to push into the tree, the smaller ones take less effort, and after a good hour of drilling, the tree you've chosen has needles sticking out of it from all sides. A little bit of sap starts to drip out after some more minutes, and the syringes start to fill slowly. Around noon, you notice the temperature rising, and suddenly hear a voice in your head: 'Planet unstable. Return to ship. Repeat. Planet unstable. Get the hell out of there.' You quickly empty everything in a one-liter vial, almost filling it to the brim, and run back to the ship.
+1 liter of Alien Tree Sap (i: 65)
+36 Gathering XP

gather

Attempt: 92
Quality: 62
Quantity: 55 (1)
Getting fed up with this world, you decide to show it who's the boss. If there is no surface metal, you'll have to dig deeper. Much deeper. You borrow a mining drill from the tool storage, and infuse it with all the anger and frustration you gathered the last few days. The drill starts glowing red-hot, and around you the planet's surface starts melting. You point it down, and start drilling.
The drill eats trough the rock as if it was butter, slicing through the few kinds of rock that don't immediately melt when you and your drill get close. You quickly summon a heads-up depth indicator, and see you're already several kilometers deep, traveling trough the earth at a whopping 1500 km/h. Still, the trip seems to be endless. The solid rock starts to get more viscous after half an hour, and you feel it getting hotter and hotter, while the stone around you slowly makes place for magma pockets.
After hours of travel, you fall into a sea of magma. The drill works like a diving screw now, allowing you to continue your travel. Instinctively, you go straight towards the very center of the planet.
After another hour of magma-diving, you arrive at the middle of the magma sea. A small, very dense metallic orb floats here - you guess this is what attracted other asteroids and caused the planet to form, as it is extremely heavy.
You take the orb, and start diving up again. When you reach the tunnel trough solid rock, you notice the magma has eaten away most of your drill. The anger energy is leaking, and it won't take long before it'll burst open, releasing everything at once. "Oh crap", you think, and throw the drill back into the sea of magma with enormous force, towards the center. But you're too late to escape. A few seconds later, you hear an enormous explosion, and brace for impact.
The compressed magma shoots trough the tunnel at an incredible speed, taking you with it. You can only hope your already strained shields will hold. After what seems like an eternity of tunnel, the magma jet shoots out of the entrance, and you find yourself surfing on top of it. From your momentarily high vantage point, you see cracks appearing in the surface, more lava flowing out of them, then you fall back down to the ground. You make a roll when you come down, and with your last bit of energy, you sprint towards the alagaia portal, which shuts right behind you. The engines are ready to go, and you take off. After a few seconds, you can see the whole planet exploding in a ball of flames.
"That was awesome." says a voice next to you. You look around, to see Osin with an enormous grin. "Now, the COGAD rules force me to reprimand you. Bad boy. Don't blow up planets. Not even if it's partially Reisen's fault."
"Now that that is out of the way, here's a little something for making my day."
+1 Alien Heavy Metal Planet Core (I: 124)
+46 Gather XP
+10 Influence

Arg, this time, just raise a slab of rock, and take that.

Attempt: 28
You are getting seriously mad at this rock. No, really, what does it think it is? It's just rock, like any other rock, it's not 'special' just because it looks a bit weird.
You start working yourself up against the rock outside. If you get angry enough, you might be able to channel your anger into your magic, and make it more powerful. You think.
Anyway, you have a few hours to spare, so it's worth a try. This afternoon, you will raise the rock, you will tear it loose from the rest of the planet, you will take away it's home, you will desecrate all it believes in. This rock deserves it. And worse. You will torture it, break its mind, destroy its will. You will show everyone that you are stronger than this rock.
You keep on going like this for a while, getting angrier and angrier at the abomination, no, the pure evil that the rock outside is. And then the alarms go off, once more. "Warning. Planet is instable. Do not attempt to leave the ship."
You curse. Another day wasted.
+14 gather XP

This turn's action: I'll use that intangible power thing to program an operating system for my powers for all that screen displaying and glowing keyboards and stuff. It'll appear like a glowing sign on it's owners forehead at most times, but at a word of power all those screens and keyboards and stuff appear. It takes it's power from whatever magic power the owner has, which in the case of us creators means being able to automate the direction of creating to do tedious and fast things like etching binary data onto an object. There is a command from inside the interface to transfer ownership to someone else, who must be a willing recipient. The actual computing power and such is "hijacked" from the owners brain, which means you can't store long term more than you can memorize, hence the plot convenient need for random external objects to store data on. If my crafting roll is good enough for it other features might be uploading and downloading content from memories.

Attempt: 35
When you wrap your powers around those in the bottle, you soon realize this stuff is strong. This isn't your run-off-the-mill energy, this is several gigawatt hours¹ of energy in a bottle. Energy with a will. A will as strong as your own, you realize, as your attempts to push it into a usable shape are futile, and your concentration breaks as the alarms start blaring again, instantly destroying any hope of progress today.
+18 energy manipulation xp

1: Expressing energy in Joule is for wussies, according to real programmers. Real Men, like you, love electronics, and use watt hours.

Collect the branches.

Attempt: 95
Quality: 74
Quantity: 88 (2)
You laugh as you see Taric struggling, falling, and collecting some useless pieces of wood. You have, with a bit of thought and some scanning equipment, realized that the trees grow far above the planet, and that these are but the very youngest saplings of the smallest species of the plants that are floating somewhere up there. Somehow, they float up when they get older. You're not really interested in that though, you're not a botanist.
You jump.
Good thing you reinforce the earth beneath your feet, as well as your feet, the force of your jump could have smashed the rocks you stood on right trough the planet. You fly with an incredible speed past clouds, past floating plants that look like sharp, blue grass, past some devilishly-looking flowers, trough a giant bush with razor-sharp leave - dammit, that was your best tunic - and then you see the end of your trip: a gigantic tree, with thousands o branches and millions of round, balloon-like leaves, and roots extending into the clouds - which you realize is how they get water. Or rather, black acidic ooze.
Your trip ends abruptly when you smack into one of the bigger branches of the tree. And what a branch it is, it could house thousands of your people if it were to be hollowed out. Again, your thoughts are interrupted as you start falling back down. You notice a few smaller - about ten meters long - branches falling with you, probably broke off from the shock. You manage to grab them in mid-air, and the you reinforce your feet again - time to land.
You realize you forgot to strengthen the ground, just as your feet impact with the ground, breaking it open. You only come to a standstill several meters beyond the surface, and as you climb out of the hole, you see the cleft you made grow bigger and bigger. You run back to the ship, as lava starts filling the gully. Why is there lava that close to the surface?
You make it back to the ship, the planet breaking down behind you. You think for a moment you see Monty on one of the lava fountains, but it's probably just a fantasy.
Osin is standing next to you. Weird, you didn't see him coming. "You know, I've always wanted to blow that planet to pieces. Here's something for the effort. Oh, and the rules of godhood tell me I have to reprimand you. Bad boy", Osin says wtih a wide grin.
+2 Giant Alien Branches
+48 Gather XP (level up!)
+10 Influence

As the Alagaia takes off, Osin calls all of you together in the conference room, the same room where you first met him.
"So, welcome, thanks for coming. As you might or might not know, I'm a fairly young god. I only had one apocalypse - a flood, how boring can it get - and I don't have much experience with ships like this. So I'm experimenting a bit. For the next world, I have found something special. I discovered yesterday, that the Alagaia is not only capable of traveling to planets. It can travel to almost everything I'd want. I knew that already, but the weird thing is, it can travel to abstract stuff too.
"The next world is such an abstract concept. It'll be my first, but I read that specific chapter of the manual, so I know what to expect. I know you're wondering what I'm trying to say, so I'll try to keep it simple. Most of you come from a planet called Earth, or their forefathers do (he nods to Monty). So, I randomly picked one single person from earth, and had the Alagaia plot a course for his thoughts."
"Yep, that's right, soon we will be exploring the mind of a guy from earth. He's called Simon, in case you wonder. I called you hear to brag about what I can do, of course, but also to give you a few guidelines, for exploring thoughts is not easy."
"First, we will explore only three minutes of what's going on in his brain in the three days we get. This is because thoughts are incredibly fast, we'd get lost if we did this in realtime. Second, you will find objects. Those are visual memories. Sleeping, or unmoving objects, are memories that are not being used by the brain at that moment. Active objects are related to the thoughts he have. If he thinks about drinking a beer, for instance, a tap might start tapping."
"Third, be cautious. To the brain, we are corrupt memories, seeds of madness and psychosis, and it will try to erase us, especially if we interact with other memories. You can still try gathering them of course, and I recon it's not much more difficult than avoiding pools of black ooze or dodging ancient halfgods deep under the sea. We should be safe inside the ship, it is cloaked to everything and anything ever."
"Something else: there is one constant, heavily active thought process throughout these three minutes. Since it is the main thought that is occupying most of the brain, most of the activity will be related to it. I read what it was in the ship's computer, but I'd like it if you guys guess during or after your exploration. As an extra incentive, the first one to be exactly right gets a special bonus."
"One more thing before you leave: try not to destroy this 'planet'. I imagine Simon would like to keep his brain. Now go get some rest, an tomorrow, another day of crafting. Good luck!"

World difficulty: 61
You land on a soft, squishy object. This must be Simon's Mind. It appears to be pulsating once every seventeen minutes. Around the landscape are hundreds of apparently random objects, ranging from a can of coke to an old farm house, all completely out of context on the soft pink floor.

Spoiler: Players (click to show/hide)

Group inventory
5 oak logs. (25 each)
2 blocks of white stone. (50 each)
2 reddish-yellow metal bars. (100 each)
1 animal skull (possibly feline) (150)

Ochita
Influence: 100
Stonecrafting: 5
Gathering: 1 (16/100)
1 Red Lobster (I: 33)
2 Liter of Water (I: 19)

Reisen
Influence: 100
Alchemy: 5
Gathering: 1 (32/100)
1 liter of pure water (I: 11)
3 Vials of Dark Liquid (I: 24 each)
3 Alien Rocks (I: 2 each)
2 Giant Alien Branches (I: 74 each)

Dwarson
Influence: 100
Cooking: 5 (40/100)
Gathering: 0 (82/100)
2 Blue-Green Fish (I: 21 each)
1 Big Black Fish (I: 58)
1 Liter of Alien Tree Sap (I: 65)

Mel
Influence: 100
Real Programming: 5
Geomancing: 0 (14/100)
Electronics: 0 (42/100)
Energy Manipulating: 0 (18/100)
Gathering: 0 (96/100)
5 Wax Cylinders (I: 11 each)
1 Vial of Energy Stuff (I: 78)

Taric
Influence: 100
Robotics: 5 (88/100)
Fusion: 0 (6/100)
Gathering: 1 (33/100)
3 Scraps of Iron (I: 21 each)
6 Pieces of Wood (I: 7 each)
6 Alien Branches (I: 3 each)
1 Man of Steel (I: 222)

Monty
Influence: 100
Futuristic Weaponry: 5
Gathering: 0 (73/100)
1 Alien Heavy Metal Planet Core (I: 124)

[Haika]

Hmm, I didn't take into account that he actually had some 'power' I thought he meant his powers as a creator. Either way, my suggestions here are just that, Eagle is the boss. He seems to have a more definate tool usage and containers and such than I do.

I may steal the moving into the mind of someone idea however, that's pretty cool.

[Ochita]

Gather all of the edible stuff.