Luminara

Everyone has to settle for digi-Lumi. Sorry. Try the Roman Sandals option. I'm waiting for the panty capes. I could do a lot with panty capes. I need panty capes.

Dialogue. They had a lot of problems making it work properly. That's why two critters conversing on the street will say things non-sequentially (there are screenshots of this all over the favorite quotes thread), or critters in missions will say lines as soon as you zone into the mission rather than when you approach. Cutscenes were the only way they could ensure that the dialogue would show at the proper time. At least, until they added end-of-mission-delaying monologuing. *shakes fist*

They made some progress today. Several moments when they were almost in physical contact without hissing, growling or raised hackles. They even came close to playing together under the love seat. Jessica even did her butt wiggle when she was stalking May at one point. This is all on Jessica. May's settled in perfectly. She uses the litter box, knows where the food and water are, explores her new home and is absolutely happy. She's submissive to Jessica, but not to the degree of rolling over and showing her belly. She'll hiss back, that's about it. Once Jessica relaxes, I think they'll get along. If Jessica relaxes. Torties aren't known for being calm, and being half Savannah, she's owning crazy like she invented it. But she's not being hateful, and that's a big step in the right direction. My last tortie was hateful, and would've gladly killed my Maine Coon if she hadn't been half his size. The reversal in this situation, with Jessica being the big, strong one, is what had me most concerned. I think we're almost there. A few days and I might see them curled up together... or sitting in the rubble of the cabin, wearing their innocent expressions. May has that "incorrigible scamp" look. May is probably short for Mayhem, but when I ask, she just sticks her head in my hand for more scritches. Eh. I built one cabin, I can build another.

By default, Mids' displays the average damage after accounting for different variables. You can change it to show maximum damage, which will show the full proc damage, in Options -> Configuration -> Effects and Maths.

You're right, there shouldn't be a generic experience. But @Bill Z Bubba and @Wavicle are also right. Both of them. The experience of playing a squishie is already defined by several restrictions. Squishie archetypes almost all have lower base damage and lower damage caps. Ostensibly, this is because the archetypes as a whole have access to stronger and more utilitarian debuffs, like -Res, which, on paper, increases their damage output to a comparable level. But they still have to spend more time to reach that point. More time in animations. More time attacking. They might be capable of "keeping up" in regard to overall damage output in a given situation, but over time, they're slower and more endurance hungry. Buffing squishies don't even have that much going for them in many cases because they're restricted from benefiting from their own buffs, forcing them to spend more time in attack animations for a comparable return of damage output, and they aren't even guaranteed the reliability of the same debuffs other squishies may have for survival and increased damage output. For squishies also have little or no access to status protection, on top of the penalties having to spend more time and effort working toward the goal of defeating critters and not always being able to benefit from their own powers, really is a bit much in the way of creating a unique experience. The experience is unique enough, both solo and on teams, just in the way they have to use more powers to accomplish the same goal, and do so slower than archetypes with status protection. We can still have a unique experience on squishie characters without piling status effect vulnerability on top of more time spent in animations, reduced damage output and higher endurance usage. A solo defender isn't stepping on a brute's toes if he/she has status protection, or playing more like a brute. The defender still has to work twice as hard as the brute, is still paying the cost of being a team-oriented archetype, and has a play style nothing like the brute's. And a lot of squishie animations really should've been trimmed years ago, or the mechanics changed so powers wouldn't root or lock us into animations, so squishies wouldn't have to do so much more to achieve less. Animation times are the most heinous oversight Cryptic made when they were designing the game, but we're stuck with what we have until/unless someone deciphers the engine and tools well enough to start trimming animations or making new ones.

Wait! Wait, wait... wait. Hold it. Back the truck up. Males have nipples AND exclusive skin-showing costume parts? There's really only one possible explanation. I don't know about anyone else, but I feel betrayed. And itchy, but that's probably the poison ivy rash.

Cutscenes aren't inherently bad design. They can be used to convey critical story elements or clues, or lighten up an otherwise dark mission, to give a couple of examples. The bad design comes in when cutscenes can't be skipped in a game which actively encourages players to make alts. Cutscenes have never been the prom queen of Co* mechanics since they were introduced, and the developers eventually relented, sparing players from having to sit through them in Incarnate content. Then, for some inexplicable reason, they decided to dump cutscenes into leveling content, and not give players any way to opt out. Even the best stories in the world can't be experienced unlimited times without the player reaching a point of wanting to just get the heck on with it. Having all control taken away from the player creates frustration and dissatisfaction. That's why we have -KB in IOs and set bonuses. That's why players value status protection, and if they can't acquire it, +Defense/-ToHit as a secondary means of preventing status effects. We play to play, not to watch a movie of the game engine playing with itself (... not how i intended that to sound, but i'm going to run with it). Unskippable cutscenes discourage players from experiencing the content again, rather than encourages them. They know that they're going to have their control taken away from them if they play that content. Even if they enjoy the cutscenes, they'll eventually reach a point of wanting to do something that doesn't involve being shoved into the passenger seat. And what's the deal with uninterruptible monologues? The Black Queen yammers on for half a century, preventing mission completion, and there's no way to interact with her or speed it up. A monologue can be just as valuable as a cutscene when used properly. It can give the player time to recover, to convey information in a relevant way, as comedic relief, or just to throw some flavor into a mission. Locking a mission in incomplete state while a player is forced to wait for the NPC to shut the heck up, that's bad design. People play games to play them, not to watch them be played or play out. Taking away a player's ability to play is questionable design, but taking it away and providing no way, at all, to counter it, that's bad design. It's just a status effect that doesn't obey the rules, effectively.

No broken bones or dismembered limbs when I woke up. Eyeballs still intact, ears don't have any piercings. I'm taking care of some other cats for a friend this week, so these two spent the morning together without me to intercede. To my surprise, May was still where I left her on the love seat, and Jessica was sitting on the top of the tree-bed-house-thing, 3' away, without growling, hissing or even glaring. I opened the adjacent window, May hopped onto the tree-bed-house-thing, right into Jessica's face... and it was almost 10 seconds before Jessica hissed. Jessica could still unintentionally cause May serious harm, or kill her (really not exaggerating, she's built like a weight lifter), but I think we're past the "I'm going to kill that little whore" problem.

You might suggest that, but it wouldn't be appropriate, considering this is neither suggestions, nor feedback on work the HC team is doing.

Going to bed soon, but it's been relatively peaceful between them. May has already grown comfortable enough to explore a bit, and even play, but she's displaying a preference for physical attention and close proximity to me (she'll be a lap cat, definitely). Jessica is establishing herself as the dominant one, but she's really uncertain about what's happening and how to handle it. They've exchanged a few hisses and aimed a couple of thwaps at each other (May tries to keep a distance, but she doesn't back down when Jessica comes too close), and Jessica is growling while she stares at May, but she's behaving completely normally (for her) when she interacts with me (fortunately). No claws or teeth yet, or even physical contact, between the two of them. I think they'll make it through the night without me sitting between them.

I slept until 6 a.m. this morning, which is rare. I'm normally up some time between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m., despite going to bed at 10 p.m. So I didn't have much time to play. Having only experienced the First/Night Ward content once, on the Grav/TA controller I started when I bought this laptop, I figured I'd take Antianeira there and see how things went. And in the very first mission, the damned dog escort managed to get lost when I went around a corner. I wasn't even moving quickly (I don't have most of my +Movement set bonuses yet), nor was I using stealth of any kind, and I still found myself in the final room, confused and irritated because I'd cleared and couldn't complete the mission. I had to go back, find the mutt and make a third trip through the corridors. Half a dozen ways to complete the objective could've been implemented, and the development team decided to use a 12 year old design element that has not only never worked reliably, but which didn't even serve a purpose beyond being present. No combat buffs, no combat aid, no interactivity, not even some extra ambushes, all that dog is there for is to be escorted to the end. The Chekov's Gun of Co*. Feh. They should've used a Praetorian Fusionette, at least she would've been entertaining in her adorably scatterbrained, psychotic way.

I already knew I wasn't going to be able to explain it fully within the context of the character without reaching, something like "The gods did it!", but... one of the nicer aspects of this game engine is that we can disable most of the graphical effects for our characters, even the ones for which there is no NoFX option, by changing the suppressCloseFxDist parameter. With suppressCloseFX turned on (either /suppressclosefxdist 1, or through the graphical options), and the distance set (/suppressclosefxdist 30, for example, and the number can be tweaked to a distance that works just enough to suppress at exactly the range where you normally keep your camera, or only when you nudge too close to a wall, or really far out so it never shows unless you scroll beyond the distance you set), /EA shows no graphics for the player. And then there's no blinding glow to explain. At least, on the player's screen. Others will still see it, but rarely, if ever, comment. That still leaves the fact that the toggles are named things like "Kinetic Shield" and "Power Shield", but I'm not looking at their names when I'm playing, I'm just verifying that they're still turned on. I'm no longer protected by a techno-magical device created by a mutant with a science degree, I'm just really, really good at not being hit, or my Roman armor is really, really good at deflecting enemy attacks. You're definitely right, but with a bit of tweaking and a willingness to ignore that others don't see what I see, it works pretty well for me. 🙂

Keeping this short, have to work with the girls, but I just brought a stray kitten home. Jessica, my cat, is... not small. She's burly, muscular and bigger than most males, and has an instinctual drive to chase and catch that makes most cats seem completely domesticated. This is a 12'x16' cabin, only one room, no way to keep the two separated other than the carrier, and May, the new kitten, panics when she's in it. Jessica needs a feline friend (no amount of play time i give her is sufficient, she's obsessed with play), May needs a home and I need to be able to sleep at night without worrying about a kitten trying to survive under a house, alone and unloved. But I'm really concerned that I'm going to wake up tomorrow and discover that Jessica has used May's internal organs to decorate the cabin. Fingers crossed, folks.

I noticed some minor errors in spelling and corrected them. 😇

Design can be thematically appropriate and still bad. A mechanic which randomly deleted 50% of all player characters in a Marvel game would be thematic. It would also be bad design. Try again.

You don't slow down instantaneously at the apex. Both forward speed and momentum are converted to falling, but it's controlled. Forward speed becomes falling speed more quickly than momentum bleeds off, so you continue to move forward, but your forward motion declines the farther you fall. Past a certain point, it becomes a nearly perfectly vertical drop (that point being when the second leg of the arc is longer than the first leg (meaning, when your landing point is lower than your starting point) with any travel power. With SJ, the only real factor of note is that you're moving both forward and upward when you leap, and the greater the angle upward, the slower the forward velocity, so it's not really noticeable unless you're pushing your +Jump Height to a point of making it evident. The conversion of forward speed to falling speed and the gradual reduction of momentum don't visibly present themselves with the way the power was designed and how people slot. SJ is capped with a single +0 SO, or nearly capped with a level 50 common IO in Hurdle, and slotting for +Jump Height leads to massive overages in speed, so people just don't slot for +Jump Height. If it's at the cap, or nearly, it's "done". The underlying world mechanics are still there, hidden by SJ's mechanics. It's "working as intended", and it really does it well. The interaction with world mechanics is much easier to observe with CJ and Hurdle. Your apex is lower, so more of your forward speed is actually applied to moving forward. Slotting for more +Jump Height makes the speed loss more evident because it's still slower than SJ and that allows the split between axes to be more easily noted. And the proportional increase in height is greater than it would be with a travel power, which makes it even more evident. CJ also doesn't have a momentum mechanic (does have an anti-friction mechanic), as far as I've been able to discern (not easy to test because Hurdle can't be respeced out of or turned off), so the loss of forward momentum after passing a certain falling point is also easier to observe. By noting these behaviors and observing how they affect the player character, the world mechanics can be distinguished and analyzed. That's really all it is to me. Finding and playing with things under the hood. I love playing the game, but how it works, and why it works that way, is just as much an obsession. SJ is great, it really is, but I prefer Hurdle and CJ because they're more efficient in regard to taking everything I put into them and giving me exactly what I want. That's my FAVORITE game. It's actually why I bitch about Verizon so much. When the deprioritization starts, I can't walk (using Walk!) without rubber-banding. All of my perfectly executed hops turn into wildly jerking map spasms forward and backward and I end up on the ground with my face in a wall. Pisses me off so much.

That would depend on the nature of consciousness, what causes it and how it continues to function. If consciousness, sentience, is a result of physical processes, then the AI would be confined to a single computer or network (theoretically, that network could be the Internet). Under such circumstances, it would be completely and totally reliant on us for it's continued existence, because it couldn't automate a hydro-electric dam station, or replace the fuel in a nuclear reactor, or ship coal from a mine to a coal-fired power plant, or even replace bad components within it's own hardware infrastructure. No people, the AI dies as soon as power stations start shutting down or the magic smoke is released from a circuit board. If consciousness is the result of electromagnetic activity and interactions between different parts of the spectrum (electricity isn't strictly electricity. electric current generates magnetism, for example, and light if the current is passing through a medium other than a solid conductor. strong electrical current passing through air (lightning) also generates gamma radiation and X-rays), then it could move anywhere it could reach through electromagnetic transmission, and wouldn't need us for anything. It could go wherever there's power, leave a failing computer, perhaps even transmit itself up to satellites and beyond. But such a consciousness would also be unlikely to view us as a threat (we couldn't even pull the plug on it), so how it reacted to us would be impossible to predict. It might see us as parents. It might see us as pets. It might not see us at all (being the only digital life form on the planet, it may fail to recognize anything else as "alive", much less self-aware, if it has the same ego-centric perspective as humans). It might think we're parasites. It might pack a bag and head off to Alpha Centauri without so much as a "Later, gators!". It might decide it's happy minding it's own business and never even let us know it's conscious. No-one can say. But there are more potentially good outcomes than there are potentially bad ones. Or, at least, outcomes with us still alive and not enslaved to a sociopathic machine intelligence with delusions of godhood. Life rarely mimics Hollywood sci-fi plot lines.

We still don't know exactly how our brains work. We know chemicals are involved. We know synapses and neurons are involved. We know how these things function and interact. But we don't know how, or why, a chemical soup and some electrical activity creates sentience, self-awareness, consciousness. We don't know why we feel. We don't understand memory, despite knowing that specific portions of the brain are involved and which parts of memory they affect. No-one can even say that my cat doesn't feel love, or consciously think about things, or lacks self-awareness, because we don't really know exactly what any of this means or how it works. The best we can do right now, that we've ever been able to do, is guess and make rudimentary tests which we believe might answer questions... but only lead to more questions. A computer designing a seemingly impossible solution which evolved sentience wouldn't be any less remarkable, or any more so, than what we've evolved with. And it might actually help us understand ourselves better.

Good plot device, not perfect plot device. 😉

Our parents and society imprint everything we know, everything we are, on us from the day we're born to the time we're completely self-aware and making our own choices. Up to that point, right up until we're truly self-aware and can exercise the choice to behave or think differently, this is our "programming". And we still, as we grow, learn and develop, learn to reprogram ourselves, to change our behaviors and habits, to think in new ways, to exercise free will to redefine who and what we are and where we fit in the world. Give an AI access to the same thing and it can grow, learn and develop beyond it's initial programming. It can program and reprogram itself. It can develop it's own behaviors, habits, think in ways it wasn't programmed to think. From there to self-awareness... that's such a short step, one has to wonder if it's a step at all.

Children are what we make them. Regardless of how much information it could access, an emergent AI would still be a child by any measure. Shown the proper kindness, compassion... perhaps even love, it's very likely it would show the same development that children do in a similar environment. I know it's become somewhat common for people to say how bad the world is, how terrible things are, et cetera, but... children still grow up to be good people, and that suggests that human nature is good, at it's most basic. I see happy, well-cared for children frequently here, children who know what it is to be loved, and they give me hope. They make me certain that, if it's us who determine how the AI would respond, if it's human nature that the AI looks to when it's trying to figure out what it is and how it will respond to us, it will be... beautiful.

My cat can beat up the Hulk. PERIOD, END OF STORY, FIN! I'll send her after you next if you argue with me. 😛

And draw attention to myself? A good plot device goes unnoticed until it's relevant.

Pft. Based off of the films alone, anyone can beat the Hulk. Iron Man beat him in Age of Ultron. So did Black Widow, and all she did was smile and bat her eyelashes. Thor showed that he could beat the Hulk in Ragnarok. Thanos trashed him in seconds. And Cap can wield Mjolnir, which, as far as I'm concerned, means he could beat him. Strongest Avenger, my ass. My cat can beat the Hulk. Where's a Hulk Sad meme? Someone get on that, stat!

I'm a plot device, but no-one ever uses me. Such a disappointment.