Grimoire Thread

[Doctor Sbaitso]

Wiz8 is quite good. At a minimum it had an excellent character system, combat innovations by way of in combat movement and formations and it featured to this day the very best character portraits and party interaction in a blobber bar none. It also has what I consider to be one of the very finest interfaces. It wasn't without its blemishes but a lot of blobber and Wizardry players love it.

I'm not convinced you could be objective on Wiz8 Cleve.

 

[Ellef]

There's a little program called Reso that will change your computers native resolution and then change it back after you're done with the selected application.

Adding "-width 1024 -height 768" on the target location doesn't work but there might be a better way.
Saves clicks and time every time you open and close Grimoire. Working for me with no issues.

http://www.bcheck.net/apps/reso.htm

 

[Biggus]

I suppose it's a good thing that we don't actually know what CON does. Or has new information surfaced?

I honestly don't think that the crackerjack coder knows. Might explain why the manual doesn't exist. I am not saying he didn't know at some time, or have some plan for whatever at the get go, but along the way, given the other 'design' choices we have seen, you'd have to wonder if he actually understands himself how it works, and even if he does, is he actually capable of implementing the ideas (without breaking everything else).

 

[Biggus]

The longer I play, the more suspicious it seems to me game mechanics and the less the game reminds me wiz7. On the musical instruments in my party are those who turn first (and not those who have useless, it seems for me, the skill "music"). My thief has the skill 65 in daggers and 0 in swords, but with a dagger he hits 2 times out of 5, and with sword he hits nine times out of ten. For any value of the "Sorcerers / Alchemy / ..." skill, its owner can learn and successfully cast any spell that the class and level allow. In the process of experimenting with different parties, I had a bad suspicion that most of the combat and magic skills do not affect anything.

I started thinking this the other day as I was watching the (FFS, non-scrolling!) combat log. I rarely fast forward through combat and at levels 4-5 I expected to see stuff that just didn't appear to be happening. RNG and so on makes it hard to be objective without a lot of experimentation, but yeah, fwiw, I agree with you. They are numbers, and numbers alone, and while I am sure they are supposed to do something, or are meant to do something, they just don't.
Scary.

If he says in the manual that stat X affects skill Y, and it doesn't, umm, what then? If stat Z is supposed to give you a larger pool of whatever to draw on, and it doesn't... kinda makes the game er... yeah.

 

[PrettyDeadman]

Quick question: anyone know if you can multiclass into prestige classes down the line? Requirements are steep on jester.

Yes but it is broken so don't bother until it is fixed.

"If it's broken - don't fix it." -
Old programmer wisdom.

 

[Biggus]

Quick question: anyone know if you can multiclass into prestige classes down the line? Requirements are steep on jester.

Yes but it is broken so don't bother until it is fixed.

"If it's broken - don't fix it." -
Old programmer wisdom.

Nah, you mixed it up.

"If it's broken, fix it, but break three other things (minimum) whilst doing so."

The wisdom of the Crackerjack Coder.

 

[PhantasmaNL]

I have a master's degree in computer science ... what the fuck is a memory blob? The only term I can think of even vaguely like that a database thing. Where do people get this shit?

On the machine i work on, an IBM midrange iSeries or System I, blobs are actually a thing (and so are clobs and dbclobs).

https://www.itjungle.com/2016/12/13/fhg121316-story02/

The language i work most with btw is RPG believe it or not....

A suitably prestigious and oldschool language dating back to the 60s of the previous century. The reason it is still used, incredible uptime levels of the machine (99.9999..infinity) and amazing db performance of RPG and DB2 the database system used.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

Running what, AS400? AIX? You work at a financial institution or government agency and your soul is black. You sold it for the pension?

Bringing back ghosts for me. I liked AIX.

 

[mondblut]

The longer I play, the more suspicious it seems to me game mechanics and the less the game reminds me wiz7. On the musical instruments in my party are those who turn first (and not those who have useless, it seems for me, the skill "music"). My thief has the skill 65 in daggers and 0 in swords, but with a dagger he hits 2 times out of 5, and with sword he hits nine times out of ten. For any value of the "Sorcerers / Alchemy / ..." skill, its owner can learn and successfully cast any spell that the class and level allow. In the process of experimenting with different parties, I had a bad suspicion that most of the combat and magic skills do not affect anything.

You do get much better at surviving and killing shit as you go, and that's the only thing that matters in the end. Half of the best RPGs didn't have any skills and had fixed stats to begin with, and if any of their parameters beside levels and HP were improving, it happened under the hood and hidden from the player.

I critted Grendel on turn one. Would like to see that happen on 1st level

 

[PhantasmaNL]

Heh a lot of the machines are indeed at financials but also companies with global logistics, which is my specialization. As400 is an old label from the past.

 

[PrettyDeadman]

I have a master's degree in computer science ... what the fuck is a memory blob? The only term I can think of even vaguely like that a database thing. Where do people get this shit?

BLOB (Bynary Large OBject) is usually referred to as a type of data in database, but I guess you can call any byte array (a sequence of bytes) a blob? Like in Python you have memoryview (https://docs.python.org/3/c-api/memoryview.html|) and etc. which allows you to access a segment of memory represented as an array of bytes and work with it just like with ordinary binary file. Not sure how it's applicable to C...

 

[gestalt11]

I have a master's degree in computer science ... what the fuck is a memory blob? The only term I can think of even vaguely like that a database thing. Where do people get this shit?

BLOB (Bynary Large OBject) is usually referred to as a type of data in database, but I guess you can call any byte array (a sequence of bytes) a blob? Like in Python you have memoryview (https://docs.python.org/3/c-api/memoryview.html|) and etc. which allows you to access a segment of memory represented as an array of bytes and work with it just like with ordinary binary file. Not sure how it's applicable to C...

Yes BLOBs and CLOBs are what I was referring to in respects to databases, however that is a datatype and its need to be a "Large Object" is more of a consequences of how DB's store data on disk and not actual memory management. There is no true equivalent in normal programming languages because you just make arbitrarily sized/organized Object types as part of the coding/design itself. No one calls a byte array a blob, they call it a byte array. "Memory blobs" is a pure amateur term of someone talking out of their ass. Sure you can view the currently in use memory Stack or Heap, how that is organized will depend. You can call it a blob if you want because blob is an english word. But a term for use in describing code it has limited use.

Its not applicable in the context he is using it, i.e. parameter passing. All non-primatives will essentially be some collection of bytes in memory with a pointer/reference kept around so that you may get to that bit of memory and use/access it. When you pass parameters in a method/function a programming language may either pass by value or pass by reference. C/C++ are notable for their common use of pass by reference, but can pass by value. Java is notable for being pass by value but it passes a reference AS a value, which is a very tricky distinction. In a Java method if you pass an object you will wind up manipulating that obect in the method BUT the refeernce in the object is not the same reference that was originally passed in that was passed by value.

Anyway the point is the entire critique of "passing parameters as blobs of memory" is complete nonsense. Everything is manipulating blobs of memory in some way. Now if he had said Cleve using dodgy pointer arithmetic to manipulate his objects I would have been somewhat alarmed, but that is entirely different. Or wrote crappy mallaoc and dealloc code. That would be different. But saying someone using most any language, especially C++ or other object oriented languages is passing around "blobs of memory" is like saying snow is white or computers use 1s and 0s.

 

[gestalt11]

I have a master's degree in computer science ... what the fuck is a memory blob? The only term I can think of even vaguely like that a database thing. Where do people get this shit?

On the machine i work on, an IBM midrange iSeries or System I, blobs are actually a thing (and so are clobs and dbclobs).

https://www.itjungle.com/2016/12/13/fhg121316-story02/

The language i work most with btw is RPG believe it or not....

A suitably prestigious and oldschool language dating back to the 60s of the previous century. The reason it is still used, incredible uptime levels of the machine (99.9999..infinity) and amazing db performance of RPG and DB2 the database system used.

Yeah that is DB shit. DBs have to write to disk. Everything must be serializable and deserializable, and done so in an DB efficent manner. In the end any language dealing with extremely large BLOBs can have the same issue that is described for RPG in that arricle, if your BLOB is 2GB and your java heap is 512MB and you try to load the entire things into memory you will crash.

 

[PrettyDeadman]

I have a master's degree in computer science ... what the fuck is a memory blob? The only term I can think of even vaguely like that a database thing. Where do people get this shit?

On the machine i work on, an IBM midrange iSeries or System I, blobs are actually a thing (and so are clobs and dbclobs).

https://www.itjungle.com/2016/12/13/fhg121316-story02/

The language i work most with btw is RPG believe it or not....

A suitably prestigious and oldschool language dating back to the 60s of the previous century. The reason it is still used, incredible uptime levels of the machine (99.9999..infinity) and amazing db performance of RPG and DB2 the database system used.

Yeah that is DB shit. DBs have to write to disk. Everything must be serializable and deserializable, and done so in an DB efficent manner. In the end any language dealing with extremely large BLOBs can have the same issue that is described for RPG in that arricle, if your BLOB is 2GB and your java heap is 512MB and you try to load the entire things into memory you will crash.

I believe BLOBs can be of any size. You can write a very small file as a blob into a DB table, then read it from DB and write it again on a disc.

 

[Biggus]

The longer I play, the more suspicious it seems to me game mechanics and the less the game reminds me wiz7. On the musical instruments in my party are those who turn first (and not those who have useless, it seems for me, the skill "music"). My thief has the skill 65 in daggers and 0 in swords, but with a dagger he hits 2 times out of 5, and with sword he hits nine times out of ten. For any value of the "Sorcerers / Alchemy / ..." skill, its owner can learn and successfully cast any spell that the class and level allow. In the process of experimenting with different parties, I had a bad suspicion that most of the combat and magic skills do not affect anything.

You do get much better at surviving and killing shit as you go, and that's the only thing that matters in the end. Half of the best RPGs didn't have any skills and had fixed stats to begin with, and if any of their parameters beside levels and HP were improving, it happened under the hood and hidden from the player.

I critted Grendel on turn one. Would like to see that happen on 1st level

Yeah, but that is one stat (that demonstrably works) out of a plethora that may or may not work, either at all, as intended, or partially. I guess the manual will reveal all.
I guess Zep's decline + some playtesting could too?

 

[:Flash:]

When you pass parameters in a method/function a programming language may either pass by value or pass by reference. C/C++ are notable for their common use of pass by reference, but can pass by value. Java is notable for being pass by value but it passes a reference AS a value, which is a very tricky distinction. In a Java method if you pass an object you will wind up manipulating that obect in the method BUT the refeernce in the object is not the same reference that was originally passed in that was passed by value.

Dude, you have it all mixed up, almost everything you wrote here is completely wrong.

 

[ukdouble1]

Half of the best RPGs didn't have any skills and had fixed stats to begin with, and if any of their parameters beside levels and HP were improving, it happened under the hood and hidden from the player.

95% of the RPGs didn't have any skills and had fixed stats to begin with, and if any of their parameters beside levels and HP were improving, it happened under the hood and hidden from the player. But still have people who love calculations and mathematics. And subj was addressed to them. And I would very much like that the remaining crumbs, these miserable 5%, untouched by love stories, realtime, strained attempts to be literature, did not mislead the player with fake and non-working parameters. If the player distributes the points at level-up, it would be useful for him to know what skills are made for beauty and will start working in gold version only, so as not to invest points in its. When I created my first party, I put bard`s points in the music skill. Then I saw that the party members without this skill use musical instruments as well as he. Then I was interested in what would happen if the mages will not develop priority magical skill. And I saw a miracle: nothing has changed. At the moment it is clear that all physical skills and about half of the magic skills work correctly. Others do not seem to work. As Vonnegut wrote "The "turn off" button was not connected to anything, it was done on the advice of psychologists." I play at maximum difficulty and always feel if something is wrong.

 

[ukdouble1]

Yeah, but that is one stat (that demonstrably works) out of a plethora that may or may not work, either at all, as intended, or partially. I guess the manual will reveal all.

And maybe the manual does not exist for the reason that a lot does not work?

 

[Streaming Instability]

Seems like Cleve broke the random encounters again.

Yeah, it's a bit weird that it's so fiddly. I assumed that it was as simple as setting a threshold for a random number.

He admitted using memory blobs for passing parameters... Who knows what kind of shit code he wrote for random encounters. Another thing - as i recall JIT compiler for AngelScript kinda buggy - so if he using JIT game will be broken.

Oh dear, I thought we'd moved on from Fortran-77 style common blocks by now...

What is bad about memory blobs for passing parameters?

I understood it to mean use of something akin to globals to pass information around, which in that case means a lack of locality, lack of a well-specified interface to the function, completely defeats code reuse.

I like a guy who thinks it is called "A MEMORY BLOB" critiquing my approach. It's a POINTER or a REFERENCE. Standard C++ variable passing. There is no such as a MEMORY BLOB. Bet you this guy is a master of everything.

It was so vague I just filled in the blanks subconsciouly - in retrospect I should have known better.

 

[Winslow]

Looting related crash seems to be finally fixed in 1.2.0.22 although it's not mentioned in the patch notes.

 

[Streaming Instability]

Anyone who uses pointers should have known better. They were never a good idea and thank god they have since fell out of common use by people with common sense.

Fully retarded response, raw pointers should be the go-to for non-owning types where a null value is valid.

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

Looting related crash seems to be finally fixed in 1.2.0.22 although it's not mentioned in the patch notes.

He mentioned this about it in another thread

 

[Streaming Instability]

Looting related crash seems to be finally fixed in 1.2.0.22 although it's not mentioned in the patch notes.

He admitted that he had been working on it to Shams:

It is too early to say but it is possible this worst of the bugs may be fixed. I secretly rewrote some of the code involved in caching the warchests during combat because I think there may have been some conflicts between passing a true reference in C++ and a pointer reference in at least one place. I am just waiting to see if this awful bug has vanished. I wrote static referenced C++ objects to replace the pointers to caches used previously. As of 1.2.0.22 this does not appear yet as a bug report.

 

[Efe]

udm
citation

 

[Haba]

New and Trending is personalized for you, unfortunately(?).

Grimoire obv. isn't on the top sellers list, even Age of Decadence is higher with their -75% discount (desperate much VD, afraid the crackerjack will overtake your post-vapourware king -position?)