Eerongal

yup. the GM hosts a server and gives everyone else a web link that runs through a web browser. I've used it before, the program is pretty slick. Does dice rolls, hides the map (and lets the GM clear it as the players get to areas), even lets you store character stats. It's pretty nice.

To everyone who says they're gonna buy it despite not having anyone to play with: You could play with each other. ScreenMonkey. Sadly, since I moved up to Iowa and away from weekly gaming group, i as well fall into this category

arguing on the internet

scheme....that's based off lisp, isnt it? i've heard of haskell, but never even looked into it, so i know nothing of it. also: lolcode and Brainstorm (sorry about the language, but thats its actual name )

, but enjoyable also, kinda old, but figured i'd post it

yeah, FYI voxel rendering is essentially point cloud rendering. (a "voxel" is essentially a 3D "pixel"). Generally, voxel rendering doesn't work for games. Voxel rendering has been around for some time. What these people CLAIM is that they can cut out the extra "crap" rendering and render only what's needed to make it faster.

From what i've looked into, they use a point-cloud matrix (as they say in the video) which is something that normally DOESN'T work terribly well in video games, but apparently they've figured out a way to only render what needs to be rendered and ignore everything else, so instead of it processing billions of extra points, it just chucks those out the window and renders only what the camera can see. Like i said, i'll believe it when i see it.

currently playing from steam. It's pretty awesome.

Though i'll believe it when i actually see it. They can make pretty videos all day, but that doesn't mean they aren't trying to con someone or something.

Or so you'd like us to believe.....

that is, of course, if you're completely sure that none of our users live in a remote mountain somewhere in the Himalayas (my money's on it being chaos)

i think we should now murder silus to commemorate this moment forever.

yeah, ive done quite a bit of stuff with c#, and i never even knew it existed. I just happened upon the MSDN entry for it, and it basically blew my mind so of course i immediately set about modifying code that was using for..each loops to use it to see how much quicker the code ran, and after doing so, you can certainly color me impressed.

so this is off topic, but since we're talking programming here, i figured i'd post it here. But i learned something outrageously cool about both C# and vb.net today. apparently they both have a feature called "LINQ" that lets you query your variables and objects in memory as if they were records in a database. It's significantly more efficient than looping around an array/collection of objects and testing for a certain condition. so for example, if we had a collection of objects called "objStuff" we could do a for...each loop like this for each e as Entity in objStuff if e.variable = true then {l33t codez} end if next but instead, we could use linq and do this: query = from object as Entity in objStuff where object.variable = true select object for each e as Entity in query {l33t codez} next

that's what that java page i i linked earlier said. \u000d appears to be the unicode for \r it says. EscapeSequence: \ b /* \u0008: backspace BS */ \ t /* \u0009: horizontal tab HT */ \ n /* \u000a: linefeed LF */ \ f /* \u000c: form feed FF */ \ r /* \u000d: carriage return CR */ \ " /* \u0022: double quote " */ \ ' /* \u0027: single quote ' */ \ \ /* \u005c: backslash \ */ further edit: also, this random unicode chart i just looked up listed it as such too linky

huh, that's weird. I just checked and confirmed on sun's java documentation, and \f is indeed the escape character for form feed. (relevant link) you didn't accidentally change your command prompt to unicode somehow, right (in which case you'd need to use the unicode escape for it instead, which i dont know what that is)? edit: apparently the unicode escape is: \u000c

someone has WAY too much free time on their hands.....

System.out.println("\f");

i thought the form feed character was for printers only, and it forced it to eject a page? I've never used it, so i can't vouch for it

huh. well, im not sure why that doesnt work, but another thought is instead of doing a println a large number of times, build a string like: strClear = "\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n"; and print that to the screen instead. \n is the new line character, so if you do it all in one go it should "clear" the screen by forcing everything up in one jump instead of a large number of individual jumps. Still a sort of a work around, but visually it should look better.

heh, don't worry, try...catch isn't hard. A brief synopsis (that actually applies to most programming languages): A try-catch block consists of two parts. A "try" part and a "catch" part. what this is used for is error trapping. the "try" part is the part of the code that you're afraid may throw some kind of error. The "catch" part is what the program does when it does indeed encounter an error. for the previous line of code, we would want to do something like this: try{ Runtime.getRuntime().exec("cmd /c cls"); } catch (IOException e) { System.out.println(e.getMessage()) } what this will do is tell it to "try" executing that line of code. If it has an error, go into the catch block and print out, to the console, the error message Edit: also, feel free to hit me up on aim or something with questions if you have them or anything, it would probably be quicker for you to get answers that way than through posts like this if you're in the middle of trying to work it out

yeah, well, the command may have also changed on me or something. Remember, i'm working off of java knowledge circa 2004 or so here. I haven't really kept up with it that much, though i do go back and dabble with it occasionally. However, actually looking at the error message now, I think you may need to just enclose the statement in a try...catch block to make it work (java makes you sorround things in try...catch blocks if they have a chance of throwing either checked or unchecked exceptions, i dont remember which, but this may be an instance of that) In regards to object orientation and VB, all versions of VB prior to VB.net were not object oriented languages, but were CLOSE to being object oriented (they lacked inheritance and maybe one or two other small features of full OOP languages), but vb.net is indeed fully object oriented (which i think is where the people who come off saying the vb to vb.net change is pretty significant get it from). I've never used gamemaker, but i've met a few people who swear by it.

And i believe i see exactly why. I omitted a part of it. Try this on for size. Runtime.getRuntime().exec("cmd /c cls"); edit: also - the command in the quotation marks varies based on operating system. The above command should work on all windows machines above 95 or 98 (i dont remember which. at some point they changed it from "command" to "cmd" for the command prompt) Yeah, VB is pretty easy. I've known VB for some time, but I never got into vb.net, but im quickly finding that vb.net is so stupidly similar to vb that I should have just said I know VB.net in the first place. Also, in so far as game programming goes, just from my personal experience with it, java is kinda "chunky", and if the game is overly complex, it'll really bog the system down. However, it offers a myriad of benefits (cross platform compatibility being one major one) so take from that what you will. Personally, i really like microsoft's XNA game platform (uses C#), and it has the benefit of working on PC (windows only, though, which most gaming happens on windows machines anyways) and on the 360. It has a lot of nifty tools that really helps streamline everything. Also, i mostly deal with 2D games, i've never tried my hand at 3D.

To clear the command line in java, you should do this, i believe: Runtime.getRuntime().exec("cls"); Note: It's been about 7 years or so since i've really done any java. If you need any help programming games, i'd be more than happy to help. I constantly start new side projects on my own making small, simple games and stuff, I'm actually currently working on one in vb.net because I've never used vb.net before, so I figured it'd be a good bit of practice to give it a shot.

heh, i completely forgot about this topic. But, err, i said "good luck" because the linked topic was a giveaway for an ARC to a Malazan novella, so i was wishing anyone who entered luck