Crawldragon
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Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes a break
Crawldragon replied to Memfis's topic in Everything Else
It sounds to me like Linus is just getting older and he's just done wasting time arguing with people and starting fights. As Bill Cosby once conjectured, after a while you learn what you want to burn your energy on. Also it sounds like his behavior has done very little to make friends, and with Linux gaining in popularity slowly this would be a good time to start making up, especially with hardware companies that might want to support Linux out of the box. -
How do people lose the source code to their own game?
Crawldragon replied to crazyflyingdonut's topic in Everything Else
In theory no, but regardless I'd prefer not to say, both for my own privacy and because I was under a nondisclosure agreement and I'd prefer to stay on the safe side. Don't screw with an insurance company; they employ very good lawyers. -
I have kind of a loose setting that I've been kicking around to be used in RPGs and the like. Actually the setting itself is rather poorly-defined, and the reason for that is that it needs to be fairly loose in order to work with procedurally generated content and allow for tabletop players to create their own stuff. A few things are consistent, like the eerie Deep Wood, home of the elves and other such monstrous things; other things are left entirely to the consumer's imagination, like the New World that caused the Deep Wood to be the site of a booming trade economy. The most consistent thing about this world is its creation myth. It began with the First God, who filled all of the Infinite with its power and knowledge, and in its slumber all was silent. Then, for reasons unknown, one day it was startled awake by a thought it had never had before: it had envisioned the concept of Time for the very first Time. This caused the First God to shatter, its Essence scattered into the Infinite, where it crystalized to form other gods; the first of these was the god of Time, followed by the gods of Order and Chaos. With time, the gods chose to create a meeting place where they could congregate and discuss the Infinite, and thus the World was made. There's a little more to it than that, but this is the non-wall-o-text version. The concept of this setting is that the Essence of the First God represents how powerful you are; how many magic points you have, how well your body regenerates, etcetera, any measure of power ultimately comes down to how much Essence is present in the given system. Destroying something which contains Essence and absorbing it effectively destroys its soul and absorbs it into you, like in Highlander, and much like in Highlander in the end the First God must inevitably be reformed when all of the Essence coalesces into one place, a fate which the gods are desperately trying to avoid. Will they succeed? Well, you'll have to play to find out.
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How do people lose the source code to their own game?
Crawldragon replied to crazyflyingdonut's topic in Everything Else
As part of my internship, we were split up into teams and each team had to design and develop a project. Our project ended up doing really well, to the point where the company was considering making it into an actual product, but the problem was that one member of our team had been put in charge of maintaining the code, and he had stored it remotely on a virtual machine at a company server, apparently unaware that said machine was going to be shut down and deleted as soon as the summer was over. As a result, not only was the code effectively lost forever, but the employee who had failed to back it up ended up leaving out of shame. The lesson here was you should always take the initiative with keeping emergency backups, because even when the employees do everything right mistakes can happen. We ended up not using the project, because the lawyers had come back saying that it was a little too close to violating a certain patent, so that employee probably would have done well to just own up to his error. Oh well. I hope he's doing better now. -
Hey guys! Some of you might have seen my first two official reviews posted in The /newstuff Chronicles this week! I had a lot of fun writing them and I hope you found them informative. If you don't recognize my reviews, they're the first two at the top of the article for this week. Since these were the first reviews that I wrote specifically for The /newstuff Chronicles and I intend to write more as time goes on, I thought it would be a good idea to reach out to the community here and tell me what you thought about my review style. Were the reviews too wordy, too fast-paced, did you have a hard time following my train of thought? Maybe you thought they weren't funny or engaging enough. Whatever your comments may be, I love to write reviews like these and I would appreciate constructive criticism or other feedback to help me get better in the future. Thanks a lot and I hope I'll get to chat with you guys more soon!
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Damn, it looks like I screwed up and gave two copies of the same screenshot for my Trigger-Happy review. Sorry about that, folks; that one's on me.
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Something I really hate is when you start a level and immediately you are confronted with a monster to kill, before you've had any time to look around or assess your situation. Of course such time would be wasted on this map, which consists entirely of cubicles, tiny offices, and meeting rooms which, while well-put-together, are completely boring and collectively make up the worst possible environment for a video game. This is to say nothing of the fact that half of the textures seem to be replaced by a placeholder graphic, as if new wall textures were supposed to be added but were removed or simply never imported by the author, making the entire level ugly and raising the perfectly valid question of why they bothered to publish this level in the first place. The custom music, while very pulse-pounding in its own right, got very irritating after a while, and I began to resent the author for bothering to add custom music for a level that clearly took some time to design but which ultimately had no purpose whatsoever. I can't say it's not fitting for the fast-paced shooting action this level demands, but it doesn't belong in a level for a video game, at least in my opinion. And I put up with all of this for something that ultimately turned out to be a slaughter map. There's no complexity here; you start the map and immediately are assaulted by a massive wave of enemies, many of which hilariously got stuck in the tiny corners of the level geometry or got lost trying to find me after I ducked around a corner to lose them and look for more ammo. That's another thing about this map: Even though it's fundamentally very simple in design, it's filled with little nooks and crannies that you have to check to find health and ammo, something that I personally didn't have a huge problem with but which proved very annoying. Incidentally it was because of these niches that I didn't find the rocket launcher until I'd already cleared the level, which was incredibly irritating. I will give this map some small credit in that the rush of monsters is made all the more intense by the cramped office environment, which might make it a little more tense than in maps where everything is more spread-out, but that doesn't make up for the gripes I mentioned above. More minor annoyances include a meeting room with health and armor bonuses which are apparently impossible to pick up unless you have jump enabled, repeating level features such as identical trees outside identical windows and cookie-cutter cubicles making it surprisingly easy to lose your bearings, impassible linedefs used to prevent the player from climbing up certain surfaces because apparently it's really important that we leave through the front fucking door, and a level exit switch which isn't aligned properly with the linedef it's attached to. And just to put the cherry on it, when I did press that switch I got an awful and completely unnecessary text crawl, complete with error messages indicating that some music files could not be located, and finally a black screen. Wow did I find a lot to complain about in this one. I didn't have fun with this level, not one bit. Cripes, this review is already longer than this level deserves. Skip this one unless you really need to see Doom Guy shoot up a bunch of zombies in an office building for some reason. As for me, I want those five minutes of my life back.
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This is the best texturing I've ever seen for a Doom WAD. Even better than a lot of the official textures in vanilla Doom. It really complements the architecture, which is outstanding on a technical level. The custom music is very well-made. Not great, but impressive. It's a lot of fun just exploring the map and seeing what's what. It's sad to think that a map like this would never fly in modern times, not since the Columbine massacre and rumors that Ed Harris recreated his own university in the game.
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Level looks pretty good. I didn't notice many off textures or out-of-place textures. Lots of running around to hit switches, but not too much. Ammo and health are hard to hold on to, making a good challenge. Level doesn't outstay its welcome. Well-done, I would say. Not outstanding, but a welcome addition to my Doom experience.
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A pretty darn good two-map WAD with cool custom textures and interesting architecture. These maps look gorgeous. Not too difficult to get through; I made it to E1M2 before I died and realized I hadn't been saving. I got stuck midway through E1M2 because I needed a red key door to open and couldn't find the key, so hopefully someone smarter than me can give a more complete review. As it stands Memfis's maps have a keen emphasis on exploration that I find irresistible.