Fleeting Whisper

IIRC, Castle said the variable name in the code was "killTheHealer"

Speaking for Friend Computer is treasonous. Failure to attend to Friend Computer's day cycle announcements is treasonous. Treasonous mutant scum is ordered to report to the Happy-Time Recreational Termination Spa and Resort, and wait for further instructions.

Loyal citizens are advised to stay alert and trust no-one. A frightened citizen is a loyal citizen.


Have a good day cycle and remember:

If bread is better than nothing,
And citizens are better than nothing,
Then citizens are equal to bread.

Amazon doesn't actually have either, you get them from the Amazon Marketplace. That means it's some random fourth party selling the box through Amazon. It also means that the availablility varies widely over time. Today, you might see it used for $35, next week you might see it new for $50-$80. (I've seen it as high as $130 on the Amazon Marketplace before.)

Well, Portal Corp. claims that we are 'Primal Earth' because as far as they can tell, our universe is a nexus of connections between alternate universes. So, for example, while the Rikti can travel between dimensions (eg, to attack us), the number of dimensions they can reach from their home dimension is a fraction of the number of dimensions we can reach from Primal Earth.

That doesn't answer the question of whether Statesman is an aberration or the other versions are, but it does single our dimension out from the rest.

The Nullifiers' -res grendades might as well be -regen, especially when stacked

Acronym and initialism* are both specific forms of an abbreviation. Your definition of initialism is correct, but an abbreviation is not necessarily an initialism (though it can be, such as NATO). An acronym is an abbreviation which is spoken as its own word (SCUBA: \ˈskü-bə\) rather than speaking each individual letter (CEO: \ˌsē-(ˌ)ē-ˈō\).

Since MOB is an abbreviation generally spoken as \ˈmäb\, rather than \ˌem-(ˌ)ō-ˈbē\, it is by definition an acronym. You can argue over whether it abbreviates "MOBile" versus "Mobile OBject", but it's still an acronym and not an initialism. (For my own part, while I have never written nor maintained a MUD/MUSH, I am friends with a few people who currently do, and they all use Mobile OBject.)

For an example of a non-gamer acronym which is not an initialism, look at RADAR. It abbreviates "RAdio Detection And Ranging". Acronyms can also abbreviate things using letters from the middle of the word (AMPHETAMINE stands for "Alpha-Methyl-PHEneThylAMINE"), or drop entire words from the letters of the abbreviation (INTERPOL stands for "INTERnational criminal POLice organization").


* 'Alphabetism' is a less commonly used synonym for 'initialism'

MOB is, specifically, an acronym, not just an abbreviation. From ye olde days of MUDs and MUSHs, enemy NPCs which could move from room to room were coded as "Mobile Objects". Developers of those games referred to such constructs as MOBs, which then led the players to also refer to them as such. When the online game industry moved on to things like Ultima Online and Everquest, the name stuck.

While true that powers in this game have a "notify mobs" flag, "mob" still means "Mobile OBject". The power notifies only each MOB that it hits. Each of those MOBs then generates an 'aggro shout', which notifies allies close by. This can chain to pull an entire spawn.

Correct. Rikti Drones have inherent Ranged and Melee defense, but not AoE.

IIRC, the faction choice you're forced to make in the tutorial locks you out of 2 story arcs given by the opposite side, and you can't fix that with shut-off XP.

He also mentioned Telekinesis, which would produce the same visual as an enemy under the effect of Force Bubble, so long as the enemy isn't held (if the enemy is given mez protection or it's a boss with no other holds).

Granted, Force Bubble is still the more likely answer.

Exactly the point of the arc. The Praetoria arcs are almost entirely designed to push you into morally gray areas.

If you stab the kitten, you'll save the puppy. But you still stabbed the kitten.

Go grab a TI graphing calculator, and re-live those days of BASIC all over again!*
(If you want to write a program on a TI calculator, you only other option is assembler.)


* Okay, it's a derivative of BASIC and in some ways it's closer to Forth or PILOT than standard BASIC versions.

The first syllable sounds like 'klul', according to Lovecraft. The H means it's supposed to sound guttural and thick.

Qua?

How did you manage to escape being neutered, Steelclaw? I would have thought the US would go to DEFCON 1 as soon as you hit puberty


I don't have kids, but I can share some kid stories:

My sister taught herself how to read. Unfortunately, she had learned how to read, but her vocabulary was limited and her spelling was poor. So when the lunchlady asked her if she wanted any of the stuff out of the big can labeled CATSUP, my sister refused, exclaiming, "It might still have whiskers in it!"

When I was young (first grade-ish), my father would often let me take sips of his beer. I wanted the beer, because 'beer' sounds like 'beard', and I wanted to have a beard. (The logic is infallible!) At some point, I told my teacher "I LIKE BEER!" My mother was horrified when she found out, and I never got another drop of alcohol until I turned 21.

This past summer I was at Disney World. While waiting for the rest of my family to return from whatever it was they were doing, I was sitting at a table outside one of the restaurants in the Future World area of EPCOT. As you might expect, there were various birds who had learned to be brave around the humans who would all drop food on the ground to steal (or even better, leave food on the table!). One of these birds was a great egret, believe it or not. I watched it and let it get pretty close to me, but I wasn't about to let it come all the way up to me; it's still a wild bird. Then a young girl (guessing in the 7-10 range) started following the egret around (the bird wanted no part in this relationship). She reached out to try and pet the bird, and then called back to her parents, while still trying to to touch the wild animal, "will it bite?"

Since she was right in front of me, I replied for her apparently neglectful parents: "probably, yeah." She looked at me, back to her parents, to her hand, and to the bird a few times (never actually stopping in her attempt to pet the birdie), then looked back at me and ran away, fortunately without being bitten. On the other hand, a few hours later when I was back in the same area, there was a trail of Disney employees, towels, bleach and other cleaning supplies, and blood, forming a trail about 30 feet long.

IIRC, he specifically says that it's one of eleven means of time travel.

The textures and UV mapping should be fine scaled down*. Problems might come from scaling the skeleton and costume attachment points, though.


* That is, until you reach small enough sizes that the UV mapping runs into floating point precision errors, but at that point either you can't see the model or your scene is set up such that you're getting precision errors on your renderer, too.

Tthe magnitude M of a power's knockback is: PurplePatch(S * K * (1.0 + E)) * Clamp(1.0 - R).

Where:
PurplePatch(n) applies the Purple Patch to the value n.
Clamp(n) clamps the range of n to [0,1].

S: A scalar value defined by the power. This may be positive or negative.
K: The character's knockback attribute modifier. The value depends on the archetype, current combat level, and melee vs. ranged. In the current game, this value will range from 0.96 (Blaster/Mastermind/Corruptor level 1 at range) to 2.596 (Tanker/Brute level 50 at range or melee)
E: The sum of all enhancements (after ED) and buffs.
R: The target's knockback resistance

There are four possible results based on the value of M:
M < 0: Grant the target M knockback protection
M = 0: No effect
0 < M ≤ 0.75: Knockdown the target
M > 0.75: Knockback the target some distance based on M


This discussion is about moving a power which normally knocks back a target. For the purpose of this discussion, let's assume an even-con critter (PurplePatch(n) will return n) which has no knockback resistance (R = 0). The magnitude equation is now M = S * K * (1.0 + E).

If the power normally knocks back an enemy, S must be a positive number, and S * K > 0.75.

The question was 'why can we increase knockback with enhancement but not decrease it?'. Increasing KB is simple: simply add enhancement to the power as normal, E will increase, and thus M will increase.

The argument was 'why can't we simply have an enhancement which is negative?'. Look at the equation again. If the powers system supports negative enhancements (and I don't know that it even does), we could create an enhancement to make E negative. And so long as E > -1.0, that would even work, reducing the total magnitude of the power. The problem is that as soon as E = -1.0, M = 0 (and stops knocking things down or back entirely), and if E < -1.0, then the power begins giving knockback protection to the target.

There is no hard cap on enhancement values, nor any way to buff/debuff enhancements. There is no known cap to knockback (positive or negative), though there is certainly a practical positive limit that players can reach, and most critters which are meant to be immobile have -100 KB, and 10000% KB Resistance. (The resistance reduces the KB to 0 anyway, even if someone were to fashion together an attack in excess of 100 KB)

I prefer catsup

Of course it supports 4-legged models. There just aren't any 4-legged animations. [/sematics]

FFX is on the PS2, not the PSX. Also, FFX-2 is worse than FFX unless all you want is fanservice.

Yes it can, especially for Hess and Katie, which both start from a contact that needs no introduction.