ChopBlock223

I've worn my copy of Masters Of Doom a little, but I've never properly damaged any book I own. I find that paperback handles better in my hands by far, hardcover isn't awful, but the loose dustjackets are obnoxious on heavy books with their rigid hardcovers.

I resent having to fix up Windows 10 so damn much out of the box. All the new bloatware, the new interface inexplicably modeled after phones and iPads, and all the shit you used to be able to tweak or disable with the control panel, but which now can only be altered by futzing with the registry. I dread to imagine how the experience is like for people who aren't tech savvy like me (as in, below my meager skills and knowledge). Windows 7 may be very dated now, but it never gave me even a fraction of this friction, it was slick and easy going. At least it's open source though!

Setting aside Fast Monsters as an unlockable option or something, I don't think that update you guys did last year ever reached consoles. May or may not be up to the console people. I could play on PC, but I've found I've just grown really attached to playing it on a big TV. I guess I'll have more luck hoping for progress to be made on that one port made by decompiling Syndicate Wars. G-Police was a chore to run even on Windows XP, I remember trying to get it to function maybe a decade back, and the only way to do so was to install the game and run it from the installer after it finished, then after I was done playing, the game would never launch again, thus, I had to uninstall the game so I could install it again and run it from the installer. God knows why. Crimson Skies would be another one that could badly use some sort of porting to new systems, I know one of the lead devs has been interested in resurrecting that IP for many years, but Microsoft seem uncaring. So many classics abandoned. Oh, nice. You and me both. I pushed through with WinRottGL a couple of years back, because the game was still just so damn fun, but the way the mouse just would lock itself vertically at times was inexplicable and annoying. Sadly neglected game in terms of sourceports.

Thank Christ it's not fucking Embracer. The less games Willits gets involved with, the better. I heard a vague mention of how "Atari" recently went broke and got bought out again, and it's now headed by someone else, so maybe they're not as rotten as I've been seeing and hearing over the past couple of years. IMO the only way to fix Blood 2 is to throw it in a landfill and start over, not doing any of the things it did. Which would be cool, but I'm not expecting that to happen. That's somewhat reassuring to hear, maybe there's hope yet. Oh, that actually sounds pretty good then. Huh, maybe that could be good. Wouldn't mind a polished up port of Syndicate Wars and G-Police, but I don't expect the rights holders of those to play ball. Alright. Hoping ZeniMax/Microsoft gets them to do the final bit of polish on the Doom 64 port at some point. Also that they'll fine tune Fresh Supply at some point. How was it now, did ROTT get bounced over to 3DRealms/Apogee?

Never saw any white line or other artifacting of sprites, only that one rare flat bug. Still hoping you guys get the opportunity to sand down the final little spots at some point, I'm assuming that ZeniMax will look at launching these ports again for later machines some day.

Fascinating stuff. From the screenshots, I'd bluntly say that the textures themselves have a cheap and kind of ugly look, in that they bring to mind the less refined digitized photos you'd see Capstone use for games like Tekwar and Witchhaven back in the 90s. BUT, the way they are put to use for the architecture here all looks very nice and sound in itself, and the architecture actually looks quite good. It makes for an interesting, and very coherent, visual. Couldn't make a full judgment without playing it, of course, which I'll want to do, so I guess it goes on my To Play pile, for when I've got some time.

I'll play anything which seems good, but Boom and MBF21 are my favorites, just because the game usually remains mostly Doom, but the added features lets you do so much more. Fun to map in, fun to play and seeing the creative stuff people get up to (love VooDoo Dolls a lot), and it's usually just as easy to drop some GzDoom gameplay mod onto it as with Vanilla sets. So what they're doing is something based on/patterned after UDMF, and while maybe or maybe not supporting ACS, I guess it'll feature conveniences such as aligning flats, interchanging flat and lineded textures, assigning light levels by surface, vertically tiling mid textures, more granular settings for linedef specials, etc? Wonder if that could include any kind of polyobject support in any capacity? Would not mind horizontally sliding doors of some kind.

Kind of get where you're coming from, personally I'm not that put off by grabs and what not, but stuff like void glides aren't that fun to look at. However, most people don't do void glides, they're only useful in some levels, and they're very difficult to do. So, maybe they'd fit in some sort of "VG" category, but they aren't common enough to ruin my fun as a spectator, being more like an occasional party trick for impressing nerds like me. Maybe someone will come up with some fucking ridiculous arbitrary code execution to let them comfortably b-line it to every exit in seconds, or toggling the end screen, but I feel like that would be a passing novelty, speedrunners are still looking to actually play the game in some capacity. The only thing I lament is the (relative) lack of Tyson runs, would love to see one of the pros knuckle their way through one of the games on -fastmonsters, for the sheer spectacle and sick moves, even if just as a segmented run. Maybe this is one of the gotchas, but countless runs exhibit grabbing items not meant to be reached from where they are, hitting switches not yet intended to be reachable, and squeezing through barriers meant to prevent the player from getting through without a key, switch, or outright going around. Then there's the more recent void glides, one example being the runner breaking out of E1M8 to move directly to the room with the hurt exit at the end, skipping the Barons entirely. It's easier to do that kinda stuff in Duke Nukem 3D because it's held together by chewed gum, but it's still in Doom. That reminds me of how it would be fun if Doom had an equivalent to that Duke Dead Quick thing, where the goal is for the player to die as fast as possible.

To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and hearing the lamentations of their women.

Among so many other things, "A third piece of the puzzle has been solved." is a more helpful statement than vaguely declaring a barely specified illegal memory access. I can only suggest to OP to look and see if marker lumps are in order, that nothing is fucky with the textures lump, and that the naming for map lumps are appropriate. That's in addition to checking maps to see if there's any incorrectly assigned textures and stuff.

When I was really young, like, maybe 3 or 4 years old, there was a period where every single time I was put to bed, I would experience sleep paralysis. It was always a very disturbing experience, because I would see and hear these surreal delusions, voices with impossibly low or high pitches coming out of inanimate objects, and inanimate objects coming to life and moving. Typically, the impossibly deep and incomprehensible voice would come from a black and blue curtain with a stylized cat motif, and the items animating, often with the high pitched voices, would tend to be stuffed animals. I knew things like that couldn't be, and the exact ways they moved were very unnatural. Sometimes I'd see these things in daylight, experiencing actual sleeping dreams, one that stands out was the shag carpet in the living room coming to life, speaking its impossible to understand noise, laughing at me, each strand in the carpet animating, making it look like grass in the wind. I was alone in the apartment too, mom and dad was nowhere, my brothers and the dog were also gone, and I couldn't flee or hide, the apparitions would follow or start existing anywhere. It was like they knew they were scaring me, and made sure to move around at impossible speeds, especially in my periphery, to keep doing it. Both in the sleep paralysis, and sometimes when I had the similar nightmares, I would have problems breathing, like I was trying to hyperventilate but was just barely able to take in any air, which made it all the more distressing. In the sleep paralysis, my perception of scale and perspective would often distort, where I'd see things, real or hallucinated, shifting, growing to impossibly enormous, cosmic scales, even if it was a block made of Lego bricks, and even if it somehow was its normal scale at the same time. I couldn't move or anything, could basically not call for help due to being short of breath, my crying managed to still be heard once or twice by my parents, who'd come and console me. For whatever reason, it feels like they didn't take me seriously when I said I was always having nightmares, every single night, that I hated going to bed and was terrified every time, knowing I was going to have these horrible experiences and nobody would help me (in spite of assurances of the opposite). Going to bed was the worst thing I ever knew, there was nothing worse to me than that, and still it was treated like normal. It's like they took it as me just being any child upset with having to stop playing and having to go to bed, like I wasn't telling the truth. I have no idea how long this period was, it feels like it could have been many weeks, months even, but then it stops happening sometime, maybe when I was five years old. Not even a single time since have I had an episode of sleep paralysis, nightmares then and now, some with a stronger impact than others, but I was always fully asleep, and I could wake up from them sometimes. I have no idea why this was happening, whatever it was that must have affected my brain, or why it suddenly disappeared completely one day. I don't have any hate or strong disappointment in my parents (well, dad is pretty boring, and autistically self-centered), but if there's something I always felt was particularly inadequate about them, it was this. I don't understand why it was treated as just a minor inconvenience to confortably ignore, it's not like they didn't hear or understand the words I was saying, we were talking, actually exchanging words, they understood other subjects and other needs or concerns, yet absolutely not that one. If I have kids of my own some day, I'm gonna make sure to look out for this, I always resented the feeling of cold abandonment from that time, I wouldn't want them to have that experience or feel that same neglect. I wonder now if whatever that phenomenon was has any relation to my lifelong sleep problems. Like if in my youth, there was a subconscious drive to stay awake as long as possible, staying up reading, watching TV, playing games, surfing the web, etc, etc. As if it wasn't just wanting whatever fun I was having to not end, but some instinct, like I was dodging Freddie Krueger.

You should 100% go for it. There's been other people who've been stepped on just like this but didn't have the fortune to even survive, or were hammered down into taking the "offer" for freedom. They're culpable either out of malice or of criminal incompetence. I can't imagine that would be very potent in court. "Your honor, the claimant may well have had endured gross violations of his rights, BUT, our research showed that he once copied some assets from a commercial game, and put them into some game mods which he provided for free on the internet 20 years ago!" At the the absolute worst hypothetical imaginable, that would involve iD Software and 3DRealms/Apogee filing some sort cease and desist, which they basically haven't done to the community ever for the past 30 years, barring some odd instances of someone including the complete .wad or .grp files for some games with a mod, or an assetflip on Steam. Assuming iD and Apogee decided they wanted to worsen their public relations for no reason, it would have zero tangible impact on this case. If someone wanted to do some sort of commercial thing with Arctic Wolf, then the matter of rights to what assets and what trademarks and branding may be relevant, but replacing that with original assets is a small thing. A standalone game doesn't have to be a commercial product though, there's a lot of free fangames out there which are in no way illegal.

ACE Team were something else.

I support this idea. Militantly.