I normally don't pay much attention to NPCs but this time I noticed Cynn, Devona and Mhenlo outside of Beacon's Perch and I decided to check them out (since Mac and ClickClick disappeared after I got the quest reward). So now I have a party of 5 henchies and 3 more NPCs in my party to steal my drops. The 3 NPCs does not show up in my party window as allies.

Is this new? I think I read that in an update or one of the fansite interview that how your character interact with NPC would affect certain events later. Maybe this is it?

KoP

Other choices we could have made

Share your Cape grabs here...

KoP

Hi

I will be leaving in two weeks for an extended stay at the cottage - for most of July and August. Although I will be returning to the city a few times during those two months, it will not be on Sunday evenings.

Is anyone interested in piloting MiyazakiSS in my absence? Although I am sure that the team would manage without him, I am equally sure that those defensive auras would make the job easier on them.

Well, after four years of trying, I was finally offered a job as an elementary teacher.

The job market in Oregon is very tight, and there are far more licensed teachers than there are teaching positions in this area. We have no sales tax and propery taxes were cut significantly via initiative a decade or so ago. The northwest has also been in a longer and deeper recession than the rest of the country. So, many newly licensed teachers either leave the state (other states will hire you on the spot and pay more) or take jobs that don't require a teaching license (the job market is tight enough that you need either a teaching license or many years in the field to get even the non-licensed jobs these days).

I did the latter. I have been working as a Head Start teacher for the past 2.5 years. It's been a pretty good position, but it's also not exactly what I'd been looking for. It was also not full time. I also discovered that since I was not working for a school district, I was no longer "on track" to work into an elementary position. I could have probably moved into early childhood administration or university-level education (I was techincally employed by a local university), but, if anything, I seemed to be moving farther away from my original goal of teaching elementary school at the classroom level.

Anyway, I finally got a job offer- next year, I'll be teaching first, second, and third grade (yes, all together, eep!) at an elementary school about 30 minutes from my house.

While I'll be moving from part-time employment into full-time work, I am hoping that I won't be significantly busier than I have been this year. One of the things I did to help me become more employable was to take Spanish courses during the evenings this year. I would like to continue to learn Spanish, but I'm hoping to move into summer study and not do it during the school year. So, the main time difference will just be that I'm moving from a familiar position to a more unfamiliar one. That will take some time at first.

But, overall, it's a chance to get to do what I've been wanting to do for years. It's also helped me to believe in myself again, because it's hard to do that when you get rejection after rejection after rejection. My new school appears happy to have me, my old school appears unhappy to lose me, and hopefully this is going to be a big step forward for me.

I thought I should share this, since some of you were around when I was going through school and even looking for a job the first time around. It's been a while!

Hi

One of the natural phenomena that I see at the cottage on a regular basis is the seiche. It is easily noticed at our location because the bay is shallow, with a very gentle gradient to deeper water; a change of a few inches in water depth can cover or uncover a fair bit of real estate.

A seiche is caused by rapid changes in barometric pressure on a large body of water. The water will be 'pushed down' by high pressure or 'pulled up' by low pressure on the area where the changes are taking place. This sets up a 'bathtub slosh' effect that can go on for some time. The period of a seiche is usually about 20 minutes. The more extreme and rapid the changes in air pressure, the more extreme the seiche in height. The phenomena was first studied on Lake Geneva, and the word is thus old 'Swiss French" in origin.

There is always some seiche activity going on - but usually it is no more than an inch or so in height. However, thunderstorms can cause much bigger ones to develop. The biggest seiche I have ever seen occurred the day there were tornados about fifty miles south of us on Lake Huron. The bay emptied completely - about a four foot change. The boys had a glorious time that day running out to grab fish and turtles that had been left on the newly exposed beach. I have also had the experience of standing on the dock on a hot and windless day and having the water well up so that the dock was covered and the water started flowing over our breakwall.

I thought I would post about this, because most people, when I mention that there is a 'tide-like' activity on our bay, have no idea what I am talking about. We had a bit of a seiche on the weekend that, while fairly small in level, serves to illustrate the differences it can make. The photographs are of our dock, and the thing to look for is the (home-made) mooring anchor that is off to the left of the dock. This seiche would have been about 6-8 inches.


The photo above was taken when the seiche was 'out'. Below, a photo taken when the seiche was 'in'.




That's all, folks. Nature study moment over. At least now when I mention seiches and wax enthusiastic about a 'big' one, you will know what I am talking about.

Keep getting DNS errors.

Everything ok with the Lounge?

I am new to our guild and YAY!! hehehe this is funny thanks for lettin me in guys

Ok, I promised kop a semi-sensible explanation of what I was trying to say.

Here is the situation:

...........Z.................................
.............................................
.............................................
.............................................
.....2............................3..........
...................P.........................
.............................................
.............................................
.............................................
...................1.........................
.............................................
............X................................

The White Mantle crystal generator is at "Z", the Hero one at "X".

The three portals that have to be attuned are 1, 2, and 3 (what an imagination, eh?). The final portal is the "P". The White Mantle start with Portal 3 already attuned.

I burned this mission the first time just watching and messing with the AI. Here is what I learned (valid this build only, no coupons accepted):

(1) If they do not own it, the WM will ALWAYS go for portal 2 (makes sense, closest one).

(2) If NO ONE owns 2, and they own 3, they will go for Portal 1.

(3 ) Once they are closer to the Portal they set out for than the others, they will continue and finish their current choice even if this choice, due to changing conditions, is not the preferred one.

Given these 3 observations, you have a no-mess, no-fuss, no-fight way to finish the mission

Grab the crystal at X, and attune 1.

This invokes observation 2, and the WM will go for Port 1.

Grab the crystal at X, run to Port 2, and do nothing. Yawn.

Wait until the WM have gotten past "P", and they are closer to port 1 than port 2, and attune 2 and make a dash for X for another crystal. You are now on the clock, and seconds count...

You will hit the X just seconds after they hit the 1. Instead of hanging around and ganking you, they will go back to Z for a crystal to attune Port 2 and win. To go from 1 to Z to 2 will take them longer than for you to go from X to 1 to X to 3 becuase of the way the path curves around P. Trust me on that one.

Game over.

The real beauty of this procedure, though, is it is re-settable. If you trip over your shoe-laces on the way to 3 and the WM attunes 2 before you get there--no worries. Attune 3, go back to X, get a crystal, go back to 2, let them attune 3, and start over again.

Before anyone cries for the AI, though, remember that this is a cheesy fix for the main mission, but you cannot get the bonus this way. To get the bonus, you are going to have to fight and take every last one out, so that you can get to the boss at Z.

But if all you have are henchies, and you want to move on, and you're planning on geting the bonus later, it works...

--Cy

I like the fact that I have some measure of control over my interface screen, so I've been toying around with it a bit. I wish that I had even more exact pixel-by-pixel control over things, but maybe that's just my perfectionism nature peeking through after years of using CAD and image editting software.

To be quite honest, I really haven't changed much. That can either be attributed to GW's already-slick interface, my lack of imagination, or the fact that I got used to the default interface and I'd have a hard time drastically altering things now.

Anyhow, here's what I did. I run GW @ 1024x768, but I scaled this image down to 800x600 and compressed it.



As you can see, I left almost everything as-is. I moved the experience bar to the lower right because it looked kinda middle-of-nowhere. This leaves me with a great big chunk of upper-left screen to watch my battle. I like to see how my exp is progressing, but I don't need it covering up important action stuff.

I enlarged the health and energy bars and stacked them. They were too small for me. I'm considering making them even larger.

I've made other minor changes that aren't readily apparent in this screenshot, but they are mostly just very small positioning adjustments.

What kind of whacky interface modifications have you guys come up with? Like I said before, I lack imagination to make any grand changes, but I am a shameless plagarist and will greedily copy any interface alteration that strikes me as awesome.

Heh, considering that this is the RBD crowd I half-expect someone to say ":aar: I turned off everything except the health and energy bars! :aar:"

To start off, yes this idea was heavily influenced by many years of playing civ, civ type games and strategy games altogether.



To the point, So far I have come up with basic trivial platform ideas that revamp the idea of civ game modeling using means of representation to simulate a steady time experience.

The first thoughts occured to me when I was homeless and obseving the societies around me. I simply thought back to the years of elementary school when I was to ignorant to pay attention and reevaluated some thoughts based on 6th grade history text covering early man kind.

All together the ideas rushed to me, adopted from the civ call to power model, you have 4 types of mainstream workers, laborers, scientists, entertainers and merchants. Thinking back to the class pyrimids of egypt I reinterpreted these thoughts to paint a platform of:

Workers-the higher level acheivers of finer specialized skill and/or trade: Produce, sell, expand.

Labororers:Gather, ship, service/prepare.

At the higher end of the pyramid:Officials-Manage, represent, govern.



Levels of laborers:

Farmers-Gather food via stock-tending and crop-harvesting.

Fishermen-Gather food via sea faring.

Hunters-Gather food viahunting(duh)

Gatherers-Gather food via foraging(1 more duh)

Miners-Gather hard and vast minerals via minning.

Foresters-Gather organic earths via lumber mining.

Mersinarry-Highers for multiple jobs(shipping, packing, receiving storing ect...)The gap filler.



Levels of workers:

Merchants-sells/promotes/invests in material/products/services.

Entertainers-The most unique for entertainment, luxury, leisure, learning and advancing from a theatrical point of veiw.

Artisans-Crafters, workers, producers of seviced raw materials for demanded consumption.

Engineers-Builds and improves, the constructors and architechts.

Scientists-experimenting, advancing, teaching. The thinkers and improvers as well as teachers.



Levels of officials:

Dignitary-Officer for study and observation/inspection for the nation(internal affairs/watch dog). Also representative and part of the assembly for constitutions and parlimentary systems.

Office-The enforcer of the laws and regulations layed down by the general government.(Police/guards).

Diplomat-Head of official observationand investigation of other nations. Stays at homeland offices.

Emmisarry-Official diplomatic representative sent out to stay for long periods of time or indeffinately with other nations to establish and take up an embassy.

Ambassidor-Official diplomatic representative sent out to meet with other national representatives for a short term of discussion/negotiation.



Each class requires set skills of ability(say a qualified ambassidor in the middle ages requires {on a scale from 1-10 that upgrades with each passing age as it becomes inherant} a literary skill of 7, a conduct skill of 10, analyzation skill of 6, and a speach craft skill of 10).

These skills measure the quality and efficiency of the entire society and how it functions. All these skill mantenence needs can be met with automation of managing your civ from a growing basis of generality and mass affect. SO as your civ grows, so will your managing technique.

Right now I have the platform for skills as follows:

Worker:construction/crafting/creation-

Taking away:

Carving-The use of carving is to take away from an object for a befitting purpose.

Sculpting-Sculpting is taking away to leave a bare form.

Sheething-cutting through something, cutting off to define an end for befitting form.

Sheering-to cut away or strip from the outside-in to leave a bare form.



Bringing together:

Molding-condensifying to bring about a form.

Casting- bringing together for connection and definition.

Smelting-combining different elements to improve and/or diversify structural integrity.

Forging-Refining, purifying and servicing to bring about the utmost strength of a finished structure.

Weaving-widdling together a soft yet flexible bond for durability and quality.

Sewing-placing together for a befitting solution to finalize a straucture.



For managing skills it is:

Literary- Process of mapping out the situation in uniform understanding.

Speachcraft-Process of communicating sucessfully

Conduct-Process of utilizing combined skills to display charicter and influence favorand/or understanding.



Physical skills are:

Sustaintion- To stand ground to experience at the moment direction.

Evasion-To eveade for pure avoidance or distant negotiation.

Redirection-To augment greater responding directorial control for control of or rechanelling of at the moment direction.

Illusion-To deceive the at the moment direction into alure.



All the skills basical derive from the physical charicteristics of each citizen and all jobs or tasks are skill focused for efficiency simulating what bare traits people use to make their skills strengths.

And the cycle goes, most laborers look to their basic physical skills to make their work.

Workers use a mixed focus of all three namely structure skills tho.

ANd government officials look to the management skills to keep control and well....manage their empire.

There is one thing tho, A citizen can learn all of these things it's just all about what else is going on in the game, which is turn and tiled based by the way. And as far as meter breakers go, many monuses may occur, GREAT people, grea city, region nation. All kinds of stuff.

And now to the point, it is a symetrical model I have exprimenting implimenting to create a basis geared on idealogies from direct representaion by wording and and the open values they hold pertaining to all aspects of different faces(trade, government, war-fare, diplomacy) and hoping people can read into that idea and see where I'm going.


That's basically it for now as I am very tired. I hope you liked it so far and please feel free to shed feed back and questions. I'd be happy to communicate my ideas.