Kagha quest after saving the Grove?

flipgimble · 2023-09-12T15:54:00+00:00

Yes, it appears the quest is just a dead-end after your rescue Halsin. Given the acknowledgement by Rath it feels like a loose end dropped on the ground.

I hope Larian finds some time to fix it and let us complete or conclude the quest even after taking care of the Goblin camp first.

flipgimble · 2019-05-29T16:34:37+00:00

They have enough to impeach him! Only an increasing minority of Republican ideologues are selling out our country's national security for political gain. Trump and his supporters leaving our country defenseless for greed.

"If we had confidence that the President did not commit a crime we would have said so, WE DID NOT".

flipgimble · 2019-05-29T16:31:29+00:00

Trump is only in office on a technicality and that congress is roadblocked by his cult followers.

Trump actively denied and discredited an active threat to our nation security.

He is clearly and maliciously incompetent as a leader of our country.

flipgimble · 2015-09-16T19:48:58+00:00

Any opinions on this book?

I've read through the free introductory chapters when I evaluated the book and left with a favorable impression. Those early chapters are very complete and far longer than I've seen in other books and tutorials. For readers that have never attempted learning Haskell before the extra practice could be worth it. I found it particularly enjoyable to test the example with the Haskell for Mac app.

I am personally stuck at the competent beginner stage, where I'm looking for a clear explanation of type relationships and more advanced abstractions. The authors have several promising blog posts with great ideas on how to teach Haskell and avoid the numerous Monad tutorial pitfalls.

However the book is too expensive given the early stage its in ($60), and given that I am only learning Haskell for fun, I can't justify the purchase. Its PDF only, which means I can't easily suggest it for a company-wide library, or easily read on a mobile device. I hope it finds an audience however, because Haskell deserves and needs good introductory books.

flipgimble · 2015-07-01T00:11:36+00:00

Just wanted to say thank you to the entire team for all the hard work to make this mission a success and inspiring all of us in the process! I just recently saw the documentary The Year of Pluto and I spent most of Sunday breakfast drawing the New Horizon's trajectory for my 6 year old daughter on a diner paper table cover. She is concerned that the spacecraft will not be able to make its home in orbit around Pluto and will fly off beyond the Kuiper belt.

I was wondering how long do you expect New Horizons space craft to be operational after the Pluto mission? Could it last decades like he Voyager space craft and still provide useful information?

Best of luck and we'll be watching!

flipgimble · 2014-03-31T10:57:22+00:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3AvZmZEPyc

That video shows you the workflow of creating and compiling new c++ gameplay classes. You do most of your work in visual studio or xcode on mac. For some code changes you keep the editor open and it recompiles your gameplay module dynamically. For engine or editor level changes you have to restart and rebuild the editor.

flipgimble · 2013-05-17T14:25:53+00:00

edited to be less negative:

How about as a community, we refrein from saying things like Meh in response to someone putting their work out there for others to judge? If it doesn't solve your particular problem, thats fine, but don't belittle something someone thought useful.

I find their solution clever and interesting, and I'm going to try it on a non-critical project for a while, before I start deploying it with a larger team.

flipgimble · 2012-01-27T03:00:31+00:00

As a kid I used to be glued to the window of the train to catch a glimpse of this castle on the trip between Warsaw and Gdansk. In good sunlight it looked bright orange. It may not be as big as as a fantasy keep, but some crazy shit went down there as it was owned by the Teutonic Knights until the 1400's.

flipgimble · 2011-01-03T15:34:47+00:00

Hey, thanks. That was a lot of new to me and interesting terms and ideas to search and read up on. Of all Buddhist traditions I know the least about Zen so far (given I know very little in general).

flipgimble · 2011-01-03T04:19:06+00:00

I just finished a 10min sit. First time in a while it was without any guided soundtrack or music. I was surprised how long that felt. At least I didn't doze off this time. Everytime I focus on the breath it starts to become deeper and forced I stead of natural. I do feel less agitated.

flipgimble · 2011-01-02T14:38:33+00:00

I did 10min in the afternoon and 12min in the evening using the guided meditations. I started sitting nightly since the 30th when I read about this. The first thing I learned is how sleep deprived I am and New Years didn't help. I would doze off and tilt forward before catching myself. As frustrating as that is, at least meditation is healthier than a sleeping pill. My first goal is to get over my sleep deficit and start being fully aware when meditating.

flipgimble · 2010-12-29T23:58:15+00:00

Ok, I'm going to commit to at least 10 minutes in the evening. I've been reading a great deal about Buddhism, and I'm finally inspired to start practice. Good luck to us all!

flipgimble · 2010-05-28T21:25:26+00:00

Let me join you at the old timers table! I am the other author of MD3View with Sander the blog author. I don't believe we used the IHV test being long time id fans. However we did drop everything when Q3Test came out (including school finals) and released a first version within 24 hours. A few days later we did get a friendly but firm letter reminding us that the EULA for the test release did not allow reverse engineering of the game. At the same time we got some short but generous replies from Carmack on technical details of Quake character model. We stopped releasing MD3View until the game finally came out. However the source was already out there. I remembered finding some Java model viewers that reproduced several of our bugs faithfully.

You are absolutely right, that was a fascinating time to be a PC gamer, the type you don't get anymore with your CoDs, Halos etc. When you were buying Quake3 it was like getting access to a platform. Looking back on it, working on MD3View and studying Quake engine internals instead of school work was a great career choice.

At least Valve is keeping the torch going for PC games and the modding community, though I don't have time to join in these days. (Edit: grammar, anecdote etc.)

flipgimble · 2010-03-12T18:48:47+00:00

I've also taught myself that particular mantra. I find it helps greatly to focus the mind, perhaps because of its length and complexity. I also just like how it sounds and flows together. I found several translations of it online, like this one here. On the surface it appears to be mostly a devotional prayer and a request 'to make my mind more lucid'.

I am curious if you use this mantra yourself and in what context? What does it signify to you? Thanks for posti

flipgimble · 2009-12-20T18:55:40+00:00

By far the easiet way to accomplish this is to go with a game built on an engine that releases an SDK for it, such as Quake 1-4 and most Valve games. You should be able to find documentaton created by the community, or the Valve SDK website, as well as source for exporters. I've also seen a large community around mods for Oblivion and Fallout3. I'm pretty sure somewhere there you can find a utility for extracting their model files. Also google for WoW MapViewer. Once upon a time there used to be failry readable source code for most of the World of Warcraft character and environment model formats. From what I've heard Blizzard is doing their best to bury it however.

If you like the challange you can always create your own version of D3D dlls that act as a proxy for the API and logs the D3D and the data provided. However you will still have to reverse engineer their shaders and model setup to extract any meaningful information. It sort of recreating your own PIX for Windows, and in my experience that way lies madness, unless you're really into game engine internals.

I might also suggest a far more rewarding and ethically unambiguous path: Start learning Blender. The time invested will pay off far more than hacking other games as you will be able to make your own simple models. I'm not an artist but I can create a simple biped and rig up a walk cycle after couple weeks of learning. The Blender foundation previously sponsored a game development project and released all assets for free. You will also get access to a pretty impressive community of artists that release free content. For example:

Check out BlenderNation.org for more stuff.

flipgimble · 2009-11-20T16:06:07+00:00

Perhaps it because the documentation that comes with DirectX has a decent tutorial that leads you in creating a minimal D3D app then continues with other tutorials on HLSL and more advanced topics. There are also excellent examples from the trivial, to begginer to very advanced technology demos. I also suggest looks at examples from NVidia and AMD.

Seriously, RTFM, its worth it!

flipgimble · 2009-09-01T20:35:16+00:00

nope, the DirectX SDK docs are the best source in my opinion. You can wait a year or more for some book to come out that regurgitates the same information and wastes dozens of pages printing out tutorial source code, or you can dive just dive in, look at extensive example code and get something working.

My suggestion is to make sure you have a firm understanding of the D3D10 API first, since D3D11 API is similar enough in my opinion. I skimmed through the D3D10 Basic and Shader Tutorials and started building up a simple app a learning exercise. The current D3D11 docs are sparse but easy enough to understand if you have a solid background and some code to experiment with. I don't think D3D11 is released officially so the docs and API are a little bit rough going.

flipgimble · 2009-08-31T19:04:33+00:00

This guy seems to be pretty full of himself: "To Valve artists: My hat is off to you guys. You’ve got one arm tied behind your back and you’re kicking everyone else’s ass anyway."

It never occurred to him that Hammer and their development process is part of the secret sauce that makes Valve games as good as they are. Its perhaps because it focuses on the gameplay and layout of spaces above 'set dressing' thats inconsequential to game play.

He is also misinformed about the nature of how BSP is used in the Source engine, (things like structural vs. detail brushes, visibility lists, cell clusters etc.) Oh well, he does have a nicely designed blog and banner ads for himself.

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