Alpha 21 Discussion Overflow

[Fanatical_Meat]

14 hours ago, HB_H4wk said:

All drama aside now ...What about Zombie Cows or Zombies teens/children?

 

Been said many times. There will not be zombie children. 

[spud42]

there seems to be a whole lot of off topic posts in this dev diary that used to get moved out by Rolland. seems like the mods have given up. Even a post like this used to get moved.... 

[Gamida]

I am from the generation where you got a game when it was finished. I think I may be one of them there boomers.

Hidden away I have fancy boxes which contain floppy disks (3.5 and 5.25) and manuals about how to install and play the game.

I recall the pain of having to insert disks to continue in game.

I eventually stopped playing games (well I did embarrassingly play those hidden object games for a while but am not counting those)

My first real game since maybe the late 80's, early 90's was this one. Never even heard of steam before it.

Now I have a love/hate relationship with it.

I love the game and yes I also hate the wait (BUT, I understand it)

Anyway that is all for now. My nurse is here for my spongebath and to medicate me and I think today is enema day, so there is that.

Take care all and have fun.

[BFT2020]

17 minutes ago, Gamida said:

I am from the generation where you got a game when it was finished. I think I may be one of them there boomers.

Hidden away I have fancy boxes which contain floppy disks (3.5 and 5.25) and manuals about how to install and play the game.

I recall the pain of having to insert disks to continue in game.

 

That also falls under Generation X.

 

Wasn't the first computer game for Boomers the Etch A Sketch?  😉

[DocRussel]

1 minute ago, BFT2020 said:

Wasn't the first computer game for Boomers the Etch A Sketch?  😉

Yes, and the tech support resolution for everything was "pick it up and shake it".  Well, everything except for "how do I save a document?"

[meilodasreh]

8 hours ago, Laz Man said:

Sculpting something like this previously would take me much longer.  

 

Spoiler

8 hours ago, Laz Man said:

 

 

 

Hire my dog.

He's ridiculously fast in "sculpting" these things when he ate too much grass again.

[Riamus]

3 hours ago, BFT2020 said:

 

That also falls under Generation X.

 

Wasn't the first computer game for Boomers the Etch A Sketch?  😉

Hey, now. I had that.  😀 It would be more like Spacewar or after that, Pong.  I think I even had my first console before I had a Etch A Sketch... And RCA Studio II.

2 hours ago, faatal said:

A good example is a hole in terrain bug I have when quest resetting some POIs. I've looked at it before and why it happens is unknown, which means it could take a day or a week or more. There is no way to know, only guess.

This would be nice to have fixed. I've encountered it a few times myself.  Hard to get out of if you fall into it.

[hiemfire]

5 hours ago, BFT2020 said:

That also falls under Generation X.

First portion of us Millennials (early 1980's) as well. G.I. Joe. on a Commodore 64 with a small old tricolor crt tv for the monitor (bumped the channel knob and got cussed at for several hours when my Dad went to play). At least for 5 1/4" disks. 3.5" disks with hard drive space under 5kB and actual monitors. EGA to VGA graphics transition with games supporting multiple graphics types (CGA, EGA, VGA and monochrome). Stereo audio being a huge thing.

[zztong]

3 hours ago, Riamus said:

It would be more like Spacewar or after that, Pong.

 

I loved SpaceWar. I was thinking of the text-based Star Trek game that I think played on a PDP-11:

 

quadrant           3/1
.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .   condition GREEN
.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
.  .  .  .  .  .  *  .   torpedoes    10
*  .  .  .  .  .  .  *      energy  1815
.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .     shields  1000
.  . -E- .  *  .  .  .    klingons    17

command:

 

(Text borrowed from Wikipedia; there's no way I would have remembered all of it.)

 

When you fired torpedoes you had to calculate the slope of the line and enter that into your targeting computer.

 

I was also thinking of the Colossal Cave Adventure. I installed that a couple of months back on a target virtual machine for students to find when scanning a network. Some of the student responses were pretty funny. They're used to getting back headers from web servers, etc. Instead they got back something like "You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building." Some them connected via telnet and included a couple of pages of playing the game in their lab reports.

 

Anyways, I played those and I'm Gen X.

Edited March 2, 2023 by zztong (see edit history)

[Riamus]

16 minutes ago, zztong said:

 

I loved SpaceWar. I was thinking of the text-based Star Trek game that I think played on a PDP-11:

 

quadrant           3/1
.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .   condition GREEN
.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
.  .  .  .  .  .  *  .   torpedoes    10
*  .  .  .  .  .  .  *      energy  1815
.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .     shields  1000
.  . -E- .  *  .  .  .    klingons    17

command:

 

(Text borrowed from Wikipedia; there's no way I would have remembered all of it.)

 

When you fired torpedoes you had to calculate the slope of the line and enter that into your targeting computer.

 

I was also thinking of the Colossal Cave Adventure. I installed that a couple of months back on a target virtual machine for students to find when scanning a network. Some of the student responses were pretty funny. They're used to getting back headers from web servers, etc. Instead they got back something like "You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building." Some them connected via telnet and included a couple of pages of playing the game in their lab reports.

 

Anyways, I played those and I'm Gen X.

Lol.  I used to love text adventures and played a lot of M.U.D.s as well as telnet games through a couple of  BBS.  But those were all into the 90s.  Before that, it was mostly console (C64, Atari 2600, NES) and some Apple II at school.  Got into programming in 5th grade on an Apple IIGS. 😁

[Rabbitslovecactus]

8 hours ago, Gamida said:

I am from the generation where you got a game when it was finished. I think I may be one of them there boomers.

Hidden away I have fancy boxes which contain floppy disks (3.5 and 5.25) and manuals about how to install and play the game.

I recall the pain of having to insert disks to continue in game.

I eventually stopped playing games (well I did embarrassingly play those hidden object games for a while but am not counting those)

My first real game since maybe the late 80's, early 90's was this one. Never even heard of steam before it.

Now I have a love/hate relationship with it.

I love the game and yes I also hate the wait (BUT, I understand it)

Anyway that is all for now. My nurse is here for my spongebath and to medicate me and I think today is enema day, so there is that.

Take care all and have fun.

I'm from the same generation. You need to remember one thing. Back then when the games were finished, some of them weren't really finished. Lots of bugs went unrepaired because games couldn't get updates the way they can nowadays unless you bought a new version at the store. With that being said, I think (most) games from that generation had more thorough testing done because of that limitation. My biggest issue with many developers today (The fun pimps excluded) milk customers with dlc. This was never a thing in the 70s 80s and 90s. Dlc should be only for one thing, to keep a game alive without creating a whole new game. Nowadays company's release paid dlc on the same day as the game. The whole standard, gold, platinum is another example of milking. Just give us the game for crying out loud, the whole game.... Thank you Fun Pimps for being such great Devs. You rock! 

[Riamus]

1 hour ago, Rabbitslovecactus said:

My biggest issue with many developers today (The fun pimps excluded) milk customers with dlc. This was never a thing in the 70s 80s and 90s. 

Well, that is not a good comparison regardless of anyone's opinion of DLC.  The Internet really only started being used more regularly in the mid-90s with the release of Windows 95.  Before then, most people weren't using it even if they had a computer because they were mainly on specific platforms instead - AOL, Prodigy, even local BBS and telnet.  These all used the Internet to some degree, but you couldn't easily release even patches for games before the mid-90s with very much success, let alone even think about DLC.  Not only that, but games back then were far more limited in what they might be able to add to a game because they were on small disks and installed on small hard drives.  My first hard drive was a whopping 20MB (yes, MB).  So even if the Internet was more commonly used, DLC really wouldn't have been an option.  It wasn't that the companies wouldn't have been interested in doing DLC, but that it really wasn't feasible at the time.  With most news computers having over 1TB of space and more and more countries having at least 100Mbit Internet speeds available to most people, DLC are far easier to offer.

 

As for my opinion on DLC... It depends on the game and the DLC.  I don't mind a game that feels finished that adds a DLC that is basically an expansion.  I don't have any interest whatsoever in cosmetic DLC.  I am not wasting money on something that just looks nice without offering any actual value.  And if a game clearly wasn't finished and they offer DLC with the missing stuff, I also don't like that because it should have been in the game to begin with.  Lastly, I am very much opposed to episodic DLC unless the prices are kept low enough that the cost of all episodes is the same as if the game was released as a single game.  I was very upset with StarCraft 2 because they broke a single game into 3 full priced games, for example.

[FinkPloyd]

8 hours ago, zztong said:

 

I loved SpaceWar. I was thinking of the text-based Star Trek game that I think played on a PDP-11:

 

 

I remember SpaceWars.

 

Also Battle Trek where the enemy was the Vegans...

 

I wrote my first program in BASIC and recorded it on a cassette tape around that time.

 

 

[Old Crow]

I'm going to guess we'll get something as early as this summer, with a shortened alpha period leading to A22 in early 2025.

[bdubyah]

1 hour ago, Old Crow said:

I'm going to guess we'll get something as early as this summer, with a shortened alpha period leading to A22 in early 2025.

Just. Stop. Posting.

[Old Crow]

10 minutes ago, bdubyah said:

Just. Stop. Posting.

 

No.

[Gamida]

5 hours ago, FinkPloyd said:

 

I wrote my first program in BASIC and recorded it on a cassette tape around that time.

 

 

Same. I had a CoCo. I remember getting a Rainbow magazine and carefully (but still having tons of errors) copying the program from it. I have years of the magazine up in my attic somewhere.

The thing I hated was I never had a way to save it. Once I turned off the computer it was gone and had to be retyped to use again.

I did eventually get one where I could use a tape recorder. Spent untold hours using a tiny screwdriver to adjust the tape head because the recorder

couldn't read the tapes clearly enough for game to load. Then upgraded to 5.25 drive and eventually the 3.5 .

I think it was my first IBM compatable before I got an actual hard drive.

No such animal as a Personal Computer when I was born so got to experience the evolution as I grew up.

Good times...sometimes frustrating as hell but don't think I would change a thing.

[Aldranon]

I was not very good at BASIC IMO.  Nothing of value I made there.

I help save the government a few million a year by making the framework for the Joint Pay System (hypothetically anyway, it is the government after all) using COBOL.

Then my big deal for my coding career, was making the (Billion dollar) FBI fraud detection system work, by adding the "impossible" piece of coding.  I heard about that later after the people that worked (and failed) on the FBI one was "helping" the major health insurance company I worked at (think Blue) at their fraud detection system.  They actually came to my desk and asked me how I did the "impossible" (three times!) with my code in their hands even!

 

I'm smart in a limited way, everything else I'm kinda stupid.    

[Trankitas]

When do you think A21 is coming out? (asking to forum members, TFP Devs are not allowed to answer, unless...)

[Trankitas]

12 minutes ago, Laran Mithras said:

DEVS:

 

So the new models are being worked on for A22. They look great.

 

Question: are the new female models being animated from a live female model?

Many games cut corners by having a single live model. Unfortunately, the female iterations based on male models walk like dudes.

 

Can you give us a teaser on the new models? Are the new females going to walk like a female and not like a dude? 

*coughs* Skyrim *coughs*

[Matt115]

1 hour ago, Trankitas said:

When do you think A21 is coming out? (asking to forum members, TFP Devs are not allowed to answer, unless...)

next year Q1

[Jost Amman]

1 hour ago, Laran Mithras said:

Can you give us a teaser on the new models? Are the new females going to walk like a female and not like a dude? 

You mean like this? 

Spoiler

 

 

[Trankitas]

10 minutes ago, Jost Amman said:

You mean like this? 

  Hide contents

 

 

That's a little too much for the apocalypse doesn't it? 

Also, thank you. 

[Fanatical_Meat]

8 minutes ago, Ouch Quit It said:

QUESTION.............Im not a programmer/coder,  but......how come we cant have the ground snap to a block when placed. I dont know if anyone has ever played ECO...but when you dig a hole and place a block, the ground snaps to the block and closes up any gaps....making for a MUCH cleaner look...Anyone Anyone Beuller???

 

 

 

Oh yeah...

Coughs * Airport POI * Coughs

 

 

 

Equality is important...dont sexualize the female toons!

 

Or like Empyrion does have a precision tool to smooth out that stuff.

Going to guess it’s on the list but reply low on the list

[Jost Amman]

46 minutes ago, Fanatical_Meat said:

Or like Empyrion does have a precision tool to smooth out that stuff.

Going to guess it’s on the list but reply low on the list

Empyrion's world is not block-based, only building.