Duckman

I was referring to Brick Bungalow's post. My wife is very supportive of my gaming hobbies. Sadly, you have now ruined my response to BB. 😞

My spouse does not support it.

The problem is that science has never really featured heavily in any Monsanto trial (in spite of lots of noise to the contrary). This is just the pendulum swinging back the other way. You see, for years, Monsanto has had patents on specific genes in the their crops (this is a horrible idea but the US patent office has not been up to speed on science for about 150 years now anyway and that is a whole different story). That's how they control their product. The problem is that nature doesn't really care about patent law and so when plants pollinate they actually mix genes... You know, the way nature intended. In the past, Monsanto has filed lawsuits against farmers with property neighboring people who use their seed because they have illegally trespassed onto those farms, taken samples and *gasp* found samples which include their patented genes. That's like a guy patenting color blindness and then suing any woman he sleeps with who has a child carrying color-blindness (i.e. every female offspring). Nobody at Monsanto was surprised to find their genes in neighboring fields... It's what they chose to do about it that was the problem. In these lawsuits, the farmers always lost and as a result, many of them lost their farms. If the company is willing to file false and likely malicious claims in the name of profit, I can't say I really have a problem with them losing the same kind of lawsuits... Honestly, I hate the idea of professional juries but as stupid as the general jury pool has become I'm beginning to wonder if it would not be preferable.

As far as I am aware, NMS is not moddable. The steam workshop page is only pictures of people's bases.

I have to admit, Pax, that it amuses me that you are complaining about the fact that it takes lots of resources to lift off but accept as given that space is not worth it. The argument that you gave about space being of questionable value in real life is even more applicable to lifting mass (like taking off in a plane or spaceship). What you are calling a waste of time when gathering is actually a form of immersive gameplay. It's a game that is refusing to give you something for nothing (you have to invest some combination of time, skill and awareness). To be honest, I find mining and refining fairly easy. There are lots of tools to facilitate it and unless I run out of inventory space (which has to be managed carefully until you unlock a lot more spaces) I have never lost any resource I have mined or refined. With my experience in mind I can see the harvesting/refining intended as an immersive experience in the game (forcing your attention usually forces immersion unless there is something distracting in the mechanics). In Ark you can change the server settings and make harvesting easier which is not possible in NMS. Most people that I see with custom servers in Ark make resources easier than I think they should be but I agree that the default setting is more grindy than it needs to be in Ark and possibly in NMS (although NMS is really not bad for anything I have made thus far). The hardest/most annoying grind I have run across in Ark is the grind for more recipes/patterns. I've been comparing NMS to Elite Dangerous specifically because of the spaceflight component that I wanted to find in NMS and did not. Regarding the grind, ED is probably as grindy as or even more grindy than NMS but the whole point of the sandbox is supposed to be that you can find something that you enjoy doing to complete the grind and in ED I can do that.... Bounty hunting and (much to my surprise) mining are entertaining to me (and again, to my surprise, exploring is not). In NMS, there is no enjoyable form of resource gathering that I have found. While it makes sense to me and has functional tools I don't enjoy running around on the planets I have found gathering stuff and the controls make space-mining a painful experience.

I'm part of a group using Roll20. I am a player, not the GM. Our GM has commented that as a GM he feels like Roll20 is worth investing in. As a player the rest of us have seen no reason to invest and we find that Roll20 works fine for us. No experience with Fantasy Grounds.

Pax, you're not the right person to be talking about this because the actual definition of the words doesn't matter to you and you want to waste time using them incorrectly and expecting us to compensate for you. You probably also don't have any personal experience with being able to do something as soon as it is shown to you (unless you've seen it and dismissed it as someone who had already been taught the skill before). Talent is defined, it's fairly clear. Go watch Good Will Hunting again and look for a specific line, "I could just play". A prodigy is not a prodigy because they have spent years working at something... They have a talent for something that you don't, a different way of looking at the problem or a natural aptitude for thinking or moving a certain way, whether that is an ability to do math quickly, perfect pitch, spatial relations or time-sense. It's very easy to see and understand when you are talking about something physical like hand-eye coordination or reflexes. The same thing, however, applies to other tasks. That's why kids on the spectrum or from the G&T program hate the sentence "show your work" on a math test. They (I) don't *do* work. The problem was obvious to me and done by inspection. If you are shown how to do something once and can immediately do it better than the person teaching you that's talent, not training, not practice. And it happens all over the place.

Pax, I've played as much NMS sky as you have, hence my commentary. I know there is no space elevator in it. Note that the entire content of that post was in answer to your question about the benefits of space travel which increase by leaps and bounds if you can minimize the costs of lifting mass out of the gravity well. In game terms the benefit of space travel is whatever the game designers want it to be. In the case of NMS, the benefits of space travel are almost all about trade and even then once you enable your warpgates space travel is minimized. Otherwise it is simply a barrier to further exploration which requires crafting and maybe a small amount of skill to bypass. Given their crappy flight controls, it is clear that this is pretty much all the want with space up to this point. A space elevator is trivial for a graphics card, just like a planet is. Look at Elite Dangerous where you have ring systems. The only reason ED doesn't do continuous flight is their instancing system, not any graphics limitations.

There have been numerous gains from space travel. Are you referring to the personal level or the corporate/national level? We had an astronaut on faculty at UW when I was a grad student and he could not say enough about how life-changing spaceflight was. On a less personal level the list of things coming from the US space program engineering that eventual trickle into general use is also huge. Then you have to ask what kinds of costs you incur for increasingly rare resources, whether that is water, minerals and metals or even basic protein and space to grow it and transportation costs. If you can reduce the costs of escaping the gravity well (see space elevators) then the overhead for micro-gravity factories and farms and potentially mining or asteroid collection go way down. Those basic leaps are no more a stretch than waking up on an island with dinosaurs or living in a cubeland where you hide from the zombies every night. The No Man's Sky website only mentions space-flight and dogfighting in passing but the steam blurb spends half it's time stressing spaceflight and travel outside the atmosphere which is far from representative of my time spent. If you approach the game as Ark on a galactic scale then it's a good game, better than average at this point. If you go in comparing it to Elite Dangerous or even a standalone like Starpoint Gemini (which is where I was coming from) then the game is a fairly serious letdown.

Hence my feeling that calling this a space sim is a mistake. It's not bad as a survival/crafting game but the space aspect is iffy at best.

o.0 Because you were around when it was on originally? I mean, you watch Doctor Who and it is older. Some of the things that make me feel old (includes stuff that made me feel old at the time which may have been a while ago): The day I realized that none of my students had been born when Star Wars came out. And none of them will be able to see a version where Han shot first. The day I realized that a lot of the techno music I listen to is older than most of the people here. The fact that James Bond is no longer about exotic locations and activities because we're so jaded about everything and now it is just a themed action movie.

Not sure how I feel about NMS... I purchased it on sale after the update and it is certainly playable. It just feels more like ARK (exploration/survival) and less like a full universe. It's particularly unfortunate that it does not support HOTAS or even simple flight-stick. The lack of real controls, in my book, keeps it from qualifying as an effective space-sim. That said, for a survival game it is just fine.

Move to a desert. You'll think of it that way very quickly. Also, the air quality is having an impact on people. I can't speak to your medical history but people with reduced cardio-pulmonary function or reduced lung capacity tend to have problems long before others. Lung cancer, asthma, heart patients, etc. all have reduced ability to process oxygen into the blood stream for one reason or another and that kind of pollution has a much more dangerous impact on them because they are already low SpO2 relatively speaking.

It's popular to hate anyone who steals someone's estate and then pays money to clean it up when they get caught. Documented cases (multiple) in New England over the last 20 years. The problem is you never hear about them unless you go to the local papers (which you can do online) because it is intentionally kept out of larger publications and not picked up by the AP. I'm not trying to excuse other religions. That was not on topic so I didn't address other religions at all. The truth of the matter is that I had about two more paragraphs here but as the topic is religion they probably belong in RoC. The summary is, "Don't assume that someone else's biases are like yours. You don't have the world experience (and probably have not read enough legal proceedings) to even begin to guess why people don't like the Scientologists." As regards your assumptions about me, you are so wrong that I can't even begin to correct your wrong assumptions. See prior comment about stuff that belongs in RoC and just understand that I grew up so deep in the heart of the Bible Belt that you can't imagine what it was like. I will say this, though, and maybe you'll learn it after you offend enough people here. Most of us are not you. We don't think like you, we don't act like you and we don't have the same blind spots you do. Not to say we have none, but they certainly aren't going to be the same as yours. If you want to question why we react some way to something feel free to ask but never assume you know because essentially everything you've ever written in these forums about me is wrong, mostly because I have 20-30 years more experience than you do in totally different settings than you are in.

Them's the hazards of using bags of white powder. Do you owe anyone for the white powder or is this a personal loss?

Try doing a little google searching on why people hate Scientology. The reason the producers were embezzling was to donate to the church. There are cases of the wills being altered after the death of someone. Cases of donation checks being signed post-mortem. Whether or not you think it is a religion, it hides behind certain laws about non-profits and religious organizations in order to do some really shady things regarding finances. Or at least so go the accusations.

That or they have a God-complex.

Mmmmmm, roasted shrimp.... Or was it prawns?

I believe that the context there is "by the time I see them in the grocery or have them on my plate" by which time the pincers you mention are not present. This falls into the "cows have eyes and beef doesn't" category of rationalizations. 😉

ftfy

Your initial point was learning skills and I brought this whole thing up in the context of limiting the number of skill points you might have. A person who lacks the resources and has to spend 80-100 hours a week on subsistence (be it working, cleaning house, cooking food, shopping, etc.) simply does not have as much time to spend on learning skills. A person who can hire a maid can, instead of spending time cleaning the house, can take a class, learn a hobby or work on something else that needs doing... That's what WestRider was talking about when he mentioned means of travel (although mass trans can be an opportunity to learn since you don't have to focus on traffic around you the whole time). The point is that money allows you to eliminate menial tasks which you probably have already learned most of the skills for and focus on something else. And that doesn't even begin to factor in the quality of learning that can be attained with money to get better teachers, etc. Some skills don't benefit from this (e.g. painting) while others do (e.g. calculus).

If I had not been norm into the family I was I never would have had the time and opportunity to learn the things I did. It's not the wealth makes you special. It's that money is the time you need to study to learn.

I think it is a lot like the old RPGs where characters are not balanced by design. Int plays a part in how many skill points but your wealth perk does as well. Do you have the time to spend learning how to fix your car or are you busy working that minimum wage job trying to make a living? That's one of the things that made Palladium interesting and unplayable... You quickly figured out the difference between Bruce Wayne and Casey Jones.

But would you do modern low-budget effects? And if so, would the movie really benefit from that? Or is this the star treatment where you let ILM or someone like that loose on it to spruce it up as much as possible? I mean, the All-Mighty was intended to be just another guy, not some shiny CGI character but maybe making The Ultimate Evil more impressive... Making some of the starfield effects shinier... But so many of the other films on the list... How does modernization benefit a film like The Secret or NIMH or Rikki Tikki Tavi? Did the recent Peter Cottontail film actually appeal to anyone? And Dune... The issue with Dune is that it needs to be 9 hours long (ok, maybe only 5) and nobody has found a way to break it into manageable chunks. Yeah, I'd love to see the effects improved but the issues with Lynch's Dune film didn't really have to do with the effects. Could you remake Jodorowsky's Dune today successfully without casting Tom Cruise in it as Duke Leto and then having him demand that you rewrite it so that Leto lives and is the hero instead of Paul? I dunno... I guess I see most remakes as an attempt to take a good film and capitalize on its prior success. The Spiderman 3 comment I can see because that film was horrible and needs to be redone decently (and in theory it could be with better acting/directing, independent of modern tech).