The only bad thing was that some good pieces were destroyed in collisions or simply didn't stand the tension from the rubberbands.

Also played a couple of warhammer 40k games with a lego dreadnaught that was pretty close to the standard space marine design and used lego sets for stop-motion productions featuring rancor and clay blood among other silly kids stuff. 

Tyrann updated his engine:
http://disenchant.net/
This release includes some patches from the FreeBSD port and reworking the CD audio drivers.


Lego rocks! I was rather the "player" while my older brother was the "builder". I always wanted to play with the things we build. He always destroyed them shortly after assembling to create something new.
This totally reflects in my (poor/short) mapper experience. I tend to build, play, play, build, play, build, build, play. Almost 2/3 of the time I spent on mapping is spent on play-testing the maps. Ok, I only released speedmaps so far but I mapped quite a lot mini-/fun-maps. 

... amsp1? =) 

I was rather the "player" while my older brother was the "builder".

Was that comparable to, say, the "receiver" and "giver" scenario...? 

We were both building stuff. But I wanted to play with afterwards (pirates, cowboys, marineships, whatever) while he wanted to build more/new things. 

I know one kid who didn't like lego at all as a kid, some just are like that. He also stopped computer gaming at the age of fifteen. He will probably be much more successful in life than I ever will. ;)

Or, he'll end up with a fat, bitchy wife, working in a stale prison-like cubicle, for a bank or something, denying loans to people as his only form of gratuitous pleasure while he dreams of what his life could have been if only he'd had an imagination . . .

I got my first Legos in the 70's from my Aunt, as hand-me-downs from my cousins. Mainly just the red and white bricks (but lots of them). I purchased a small set of six Lego knights (the oldschool ones from the yellow castle generation) - and built massive blocky white and red castles for them to attack and defend. Eventually when Lego came out with their more modern grey castle lines, I ended up with a number of their castle sets, and many more knights and peasants and horses - so then I was able to have some larger battles and sieges with some more realistic looking castles!

I had a few of the space sets too. I remember the red and black astronauts were "Klingons," the white Human, the blue "Romulans," and the yellow were other aliens.

That Lego mail-order store got a lot of my cash when I was a kid!

Ah, nostalgia . . . 

Being a lonely child, I would pull the legs off spiders so that they wouldn't be able to run away while I talked to them.

But my life changed once I discovered Lego. I would build the little houses, and plant the little Lego flowers in the little Lego gardens, and put the spiders inside the little houses. I found I could seal all of the little gaps that the spiders might have escaped from by using Plasticine, which meant I could talk to the spiders at anytime of the day or night (mainly at night I admit) and say to them anything I wanted, for as long as I wanted, as loud as I wanted.

It was fun to watch the spiders trying to get out of the little Lego houses, trying to run away because I was taunting them so much. You know the sort of thing, "You might have eight legs, well OK, now seven, but you can't play football like our Billy."

I even introduced them to some other friends I had at the time, namely several house flies that I had caught and put in the little Lego house with the spiders. (Did you know that the story about drowned flies could come back to life if you rubbed salt on them was a load of old baloney? I lost some of my best friends before I realised that I�d been taken for a ride.)

Unfortunately, the flies always seemed to say the wrong things at the wrong time because the spiders inevitably ended up killing the flies in a fit of pique. I think it was this lack of anger-management on their behalf that eventually made me fall out with the spiders, big time.

But I didn't stop playing with Lego, no sir. I shared my early Lego building days with lots of my friends of the period: worms, ants (they were always running away and I stopped talking to them for many years because of that), beetles and grasshoppers. I even built a stable for a hedgehog that used to frequent the bottom of the garden at night (yes I know, night-time again). I became one of the first of the local kids to be able to converse with hedgehogs, although I am still quite indignant over the fact that no matter what I asked them to do, they never seemed willing to cooperate; plain ignorance if you ask me.

Like some others on the forum, I have kept all of my Lego from those halcyon days and even used to get it out in the evenings after a hard days work at the abattoir and set up whole villages For My Babies. We would sit there being amused until the wee hours, talking to the spiders and flies� 

Hmm. I seem to remember something about that? I don't remember what it was, though.

Speaking of which, does anybody have any thoughts on doing mapping from a USB memory drive? Something along the lines of installing GTKRadiant and several wads onto the thing, and then just plugging it into a PC and running it from the USB drive whenever I wanted to do a bit of mapping? Obviously, compiling and playing would wait until later. 

didn't you say you wanted to finish it? Concerning the USB stick idea, I can't see why it wouldn't work. I think they're handled like floppy disks or digicams by the PC (i.e. basically like hard drives.) And if you run Radiant from it, why not qbsp (or quake)? 

See next link for subject

http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=46806 

Well: GTKRadiant has lots of stuff in the registry, dunno how that would work. 

Radiant would probably write its stuff into the new host system's registry then. 

gtkradiant is the only program that might not work that way. All the others (qbsp/light/vis/quake) don't care about the registry. Of course, you said you just wanted to edit brushes...

I wonder if the old QERadiant would work without the registry? 

does anyone have any experience with any of this kind of thing?
http://www.contourergo.com/cdi_ergo/fla_source/ergo_products/rollermouse/rollermouse_main.asp

It's basically a horizontal rolling stick. Roll moves cursor up and down. Move stick sideways and cursor moves sideways.

It seems so nifty how they scroll it at banks and bureaucracy offices, definitely a lot better than a trackball.

Than, that might be better for your wrist than a mouse, althought it might suck for mapping, dunno. 

Slashdot liked a Wired article called "The myth of the 40 hour game."

I saw that and thought, "Huzzah. I'm sick of these six hour epics that claim to be much longer. I miss deep involved games."

http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71836-0.html?tw=wn_story_page_prev2

The guy's position is that games take far longer than 40 hours, citing TOMB RAIDER LEGEND as his prime example, which he played for much more than forty and then gave up on because he was still only two thirds through. "Who are these mythical 40-hour gamers?" he cries.

What the fuck? 

BLAH. 

I thought that article was pretty fucking stupid. He's complaining about getting a lot of value out of a game?

He mentions that he loves playing the game but suddenly decides to quit because he says he's "not anywhere near the end." First of all how the fuck does he know where the end is if he hasn't gotten there yet? Secondly, if the game is actually fun like he claims, why would he stop playing just because he thinks he's not near the end? Shouldn't he be playing because he enjoys the game?

This is by far one of the worst gaming articles I've ever read and it shocks me a bit coming from Wired who usually only print fairly interesting articles. 

while i din't like the article, i do see a problem with games that have a core of 10 fun hours getting padded with another 30 hours of tedium just to satisfy people who demand long games for their money (people who are generally poor and have lots of free time -- i.e. kids.) 

though the magazine is in my reading room (euphemism).

But I imagine some of the questions raised have answers if only we put a great deal of thought and effort into finding a solution to these perplexing questions.

First of all how the fuck does he know where the end is if he hasn't gotten there yet?

Walkthroughs. He could have had used one to get to where he is at in the game, and realized in relation to that locale in game, he quite a way to go. If he is on page 6 of a 9 page walkthrough, he may have done a simple rule of thumb that equates to 2/3rds of the way through.

If the writer did not use a walkthrough, he may have picked up a general idea of his location in the game through conversation with people who have played the game, something on the lines of, 'hey, where are you at, man? Oh, the killer bees! You have long journey ahead of you my friend; just wait til you get to the
bear. You better have a few rocks handy for the slingshot or you wont make it through it. How did I handle the killer bees? You know that jar of honey you get in the stripper's dressing room, well, you are not supppose to eat the contents, or pore them on the stripper . . .'

why would he stop playing just because he thinks he's not near the end?

It is possible that the writer has many deadlines, has a second job, or he may be a student as well and he has to put the game aside for a while to do those things. Perhaps,
he even has a three day weekend coming up in which he plans to block out several hours into indulging in this game that he says he enjoys.
Quiting may only be a temporary measure. Note the qualifiers, I don't know what may motivate this individual so making any assumption in this matter makes little sense.

Shouldn't he be playing because he enjoys the game?

All of my lessons in life were instilled in me by the age of two through a Sly and the Family Stone album my mom played for me,

'different strokes for different folks . . . because we've got to live together!'

There, I bet that will come in handy one day. Glad I could help. 

I thought SPoG told me that GTKRadiant 1.5+ doesn't actually write stuff to the registry? I just stores like if xml files with the user data? 

Yes, I did. However, I also want to finish this homework that's due tomorrow. :) 

What about other editors? BSP, WC, et al? And on slightly related topics, QMe? 

All of my lessons in life were instilled in me by the age of two through a Sly and the Family Stone album my mom played for me,

'different strokes for different folks . . . because we've got to live together!'

There, I bet that will come in handy one day. Glad I could help.

I think there should be at least one qualifier for you to be taken seriously as a games journalist : you play games because they're fun. 

I would be inclined to agree with that.

By the same token, why do books have to have so many chapters? Can't they be shorter? Like a page each? I can't concentrate on something for that long, and nobody writes books for someone like me. Where are all these supposed one-month book readers? 

I was reading a book last month in snatches here and there amongst my hectic life as a guy that writes shit for Wired magazine, and after a while when I saw I still wasn't at the end I just gave up.