Aileron

Alright, I've done a little work. This is the class tree I've thought of: Pardon the ugly image, but I figure that people will *probably* have suggestions, so I'm not counting on this being the final tree. Note that the theme is a futuristic fantasy. The number on the left represents a level requirement. Gold classes are good, purple ones are evil, red ones are nuetral. Spells will be sorted in catagories of holy, unholy, or neither. Neutral spells will be available to all classes, holy and unholy spells will be restricted to the proper classes. There will probably also be good and evil items. Currently there are no restriction options based upon alignment nor are there options to change one's alignment, so that issue will have to be compromised, probably with alignments changed to Order vs. Chaos. Highlighted classes are considered "end classes", a factor in deciding which items they will have access to. Item Classes: Light Melee: Daggers, Plasma Knives, Shock Sticks, etc. Available to all classes Swords: Swords, Plasma Swords, Laser cutlass etc. Available to Swordsman Tree and Pirate. Asian Swords: Wakizashi & Katanas of both metal, plasma and laser variety. Available to Samurai, Ronin, and Ninja Pistols: .45 Cal, .44 Magnum, Plasma Pistol, Laser Pistol, etc. Available to all classes Heavy Ranged: Rifles, Plasma Rifles, Rocket Launchers, etc. Available to Soldier Tree, Pirate, and Mad Scientist Light Armor: Available to all classes Heavy Armor: Available to Soldier Tree, Swordsman Tree, and Mad Scientist. All of the above will have a strength requirement. Belts, Gloves, Boots, Amulets, and Rings: Available on a case by case basis. Staves: Available to Wizard Tree Intelligence Requirement Death Rays: Available to Mad Scientist: Strength and Intelligence Requirement Cybernetic Limbs: Available to Mad Scientist: Intelligence Requirement I don't have any specific items in mind, but this is stated so as to imply which classes are going to get which items. The Life of a Swordsman: Swordsmen will start as a generic class at level 0. Their primary attribute will be strength, and will have access to swords and heavy armor. At level 5 they get to decide if they want to become a Samurai or pursue the path of a High Paladin. Samurai get Asian weapons, while High Paladins have some access to holy magic, though spell requirements will be intelligence. However, a High Paladin must receive training as a knight first. After level 15, swordsman can turn to become Ronins or Fallen, and get access to a dark magic. However, once they start down the dark path, forever will it dominate their destiny... Paladins and Fallens will get Intelligence bonuses, while Ronins will get an intelligence penalty relatively speaking. The Life of a Soldier: Soldiers are trained in ranged combat. Their primary attribute will be strength. At level 5, they can decide to leave their military and do freelance work as a mercenary. Over time, the mercenary will be less trusted by his fellows until he can only find work as a paid hitman. However, if they resist the easy path they can become a commando at level 15. I know !@#$%^&*asin is lower than commando on the chart, but they will actually be about equally powerfull. The Life of a Thief: Thieves will have access to less items, but will have higher base defenses than the soldiers, while still having about the same strength. At level 5 they get to decide if they want to become a pirate and get access to ranged weapons or a ninja and get access to asian swords. The Life of a Wizard: Wizards will have high intelligence, allowing them to access spells much sooner. At first they will have access to only neutral magic, but at level 5 they get to decide if they want to specialize in Light or Dark magic, in which they would retain their nuetral spells but gain new ones. Additionally, a Light Mage must be wary not to give into the tempation of dark magic... The Life of a Scientist: Scientists for a long time will be the weakest of the classes. They won't have access to good weapons nor good spells, and their primary attribute will be intelligence so they won't even get to use the good pistols. They will be beaten on and abused by players and bots alike, until level 20 when all of that abuse drives them to madness. Then they can gain access to powerfull strength and defense augmenting cybernetic limbs, and get sweet revenge on their oppressors with both heavy weapons and armor as well as specialized power armor and death rays. Another idea I came up while writing all of this is a "Shapeshifter" class, which will actually be three or four radically different classes that would be all accessible from each other so that the player could go back and forth between them.

Alright, I've composed a big wish list for this game. I'll see if I can submit these things to the developers directly or via Polix. If my suggestions are used, then combat and bot-busting atleast won't be boring. Combat would be solved simply by adding more details than "both parties keep clicking on "Attack" until the guy with the biggest sword wins". With the proper tools I could create "quests" by creating a chain of bots for players to defeat, with the final bot offering some sort of reward. As for the people with no life busting bots all day, the solution to that is to simply make the PvP rewards much higher than what is available for bots. Again, a lot of development is still needed, so its unfair at this point to compaire this thing to completed games. IBRPG is better no question because IBRPG is finished while VRPG is Beta. Look, I'm not going to rip-off other people for graphics. Especially when there are a lot of talented people in the SS community who have done a lot more than create .gif files. Heck, anyone here who's created a shipset, an .lvz, or a sig has already done something more difficult than creating a scene. The items such as potions, gloves, belts are even easier, and I'm good enough to do those myself. But, I'd rather recruit some artists because a team can get more accomplished than an individual. Besides, my art sucks. Besides the besides, nobody else is going to have a Subspace themed images.

I've added a few things for testing: -Ail's Test Spell -Ail's Invisible Dog - Pet -Ail's Invisible Super Dog - evolution of pet -Invisible Dog Biscuit Tried to add a help file, encountered a bug. I've also announced openings for artists. The annoucement is in the Media Development forum. I don't know if I'll do this in a "I tell the artist what to make" or a "All of the artists submit what they want and I work with what they give me" approach...though it will probably be a combination of the two. On one hand, I don't want to be a jerk. On the other, if I leave it entirely up to the artists, I'll have two dozen images of uber-powerfull swords and no images of basic health potions. My Mas!@#$%^&*ly Plan Regarding what the V RPG will be like: Theme: I've thought of the theme, and come to the conclusion that doing a strict Subspace theme would be a mistake, but doing a strict fantasy theme would make this too generic. Thus, I'm thinking of a post-modern fantasy with a "World of Subspace" theme...still not creative but atleast more creative than the other two. Stats: As far as I can tell, there are five stats I can work with: HP, MP, Strength, Defense, Intelligence. Classes: The class system seems to have a tree system, where classes can be available from the start, while other classes require over classes and levels as a prerequisite. I haven't come up with a specific tree yet, but the classes will focus on post modern needs, thus expect to see a lot of gunfighters, pilots, scientists, etc. In a blatant rip-off of realultimatepower.net, I'll also have pirate and ninja classes available. However, there will still be swordsman and wizard classes for people who are big fans of those things. Gender, Alignments, and Elements: These things seem to give bonuses to the five stats, but have no options beyond that. Thus, I can't make a sword not usuable by evil characters, classes which are restricted to women, or a fire spell only usuable by a fire elemental character. Thus, don't expect me to care much about what happens here. The only restriction possible is by class. Items: Items can be resticted by class or stats. Expect a lot of restrictions here. The best items will will probably have downsides. To add to the theme, most items will be named after a 'famous' Subspace personality, such as "The Axe of ShadowRipper" or "Dock's Big Gun". Items can only boost the five stats, so you won't see any items which steal life, regenetate MP, etc. Ores: I can't make an ore out of two other ores, and I can't make potions, spells or pets out of ores. "Two ores = 1 permanent equipable item" is the only formula. I might be able to make commodities here by manually changing the value of the ore periodically. Potions: We got HP and MP options. Don't expect anything fancy. Spells: The only option is spells that do varying degrees of HP Damage, so don't expect much. Scenes: There will be various Subspace-like scenes, such as "A Javelin Hanger" or "Extreme Games' Safety Zone". This will mostly be left up to the artist, but I will insist that they be high-quality 3-D images. Bots: Don't know what's going to be here, but they will definitely be cooler than simply Greek Letters. I might name them after various zone bots. I don't think I can make bots drop items, which extremely limits my options, because if I want a player to have access to an item, it must be from the store. Pets: Various animols, robots, and aliens. So, at first glance there appeared to be a lot of options, but it might require a certain amount of core editing to get the combat up to where its not as JDS just described.

There is a new addition to these forums called the V RPG, currently under development. We need artists to make scenes, items, pets, etc. All images will be simple non-animated .gif files. If you are interested please send me a pm, including details of your general level of experience. I'm planning on using as many people as possible to get this done quickly. I haven't thought of the details on how this is going to be done yet. Right now, I'm just trying to get an estimate on the resources I can draw upon.

Default settings do seem to be lacking some things...the reason why there appears to be no spells available for the mage-types is because there aren't any spells available. Polix, I'm getting non-critical error messages when I open up the edit page for any of the items, but yeah this is nice. Everything can be edited. Heck, there's enough tools here to actually use a Subspace theme (Ships as classes, weapons as weapons, specials as spells), though that would be a bad idea. One of the nice features is the "ores" are pieces of recipes to create other items. The pity is that it is always 2 items to 1. I don't know if I could make it so that one could create one ore from another, and thus make a fiendish scheme of complicated combinations of dozens of ores needed to form some ultimate weapon. Though I will admit that options for spells leave something to be desired. It seems that spells will always only do straight up damage, while I would have liked to see options to heal oneself, suck life, lower opponants' MP so that he can't cast spells, lower opponant's stats, and increase one's own stats. Potions are similar. They can restore HP and MP, but there are no options to create "buffing" potions. And, I don't know if this is what's supposed to be happening or if its just my slow internet. Do you people see images of the scenery?

You know Astro, you could probably get a lot of money really quickly if you sold all your sentry tools and bought a bunch of weapons. You could hit Picard or maybe even Dav. Just give it a try

I agree...managing energy is one thing that France does right. Mind you, they didn't come to this by listening to radical environmentalist and seeking 'clean' hypothetical power sources which maybe could be developed. Instead, they looked at the technology they had, realised that none of the options were perfect, and made a hard decision. Its not utopian, but it works better than the 'don't build any 'bad' power plants and whine when blackouts occur' approach used elseware. Heck, I'm only amazed they came to that decision without having to kidnap an American Republican. I know there's nothing wrong with taking power from the Sun. I'm just saying that fossil fuels are "power from the Sun" times millions of years. Solar energy, collected by oats and stored in glucose molecules can power a one-horsepower engine (a horse). Gas can power a 500 horsepower engine. The problem with taking power from the Sun is that you would never will improve upon fossil fuels. The first response to that is 'with development' they could make the technology more efficient - but, automakers have been making the gas engine more efficient for over a century now, and with development they will likely make it even more efficient. The second response is that we could 'reduce our energy needs'. Yes, you can make progress, but countries will still need more and more energy, especially as the third world starts advancing. Thus, taking power from the Sun and trying to compete with fossil fuels would be like you trying to run the same distance in five minutes as the distance I can run in an hour. You could try to become a better runner, but its humanly impossible to train yourself to be that fast. You could also get twelve people together and sum up the total distance, but the problem with that is now you are using twelve people analagous to 'a lot of resources'. As for the 'extremophiles' surviving off of vents at the bottom of the ocean - I'd actually count harvesting them as a bigger environmental issue than drilling for oil.

No, all plants get energy from the Sun by definition. Now, plankton isn't a plant, but plankton consists of "plant-like" and "animol-like" species, where the plant-like varities absorb sunlight and the animol-like eats the plant-like. ASP, when I said that plants "store solar energy", it was indeed in simple terms. Yes, the real process is more complicated than that, but going into those details would serve no purpose for the discussion. If you want I could give a lecture on the chemical process behind photosynthesis, but those details are not critical to the topic at hand.

Um, that's not what I meant at all... My point was that burning plants is essentially solar power, and that burning fossil fuels is essentially a concentrated form of bio-matter, and is essentially several million years worth of solar power. Burning plants will simply never catch up. Granted, using plankton means you can use ocean surface area rather than land surface area, meaning more surface area, and unusable area at that. I would expect that if Spain could get sole rights to harvest all of the plankton in all of the oceans, they could power the needs of their country, but to solve the world's energy needs we're just going to need something much more powerfull than that. (I know plankton isn't technically a plant, but biology isn't relevant here.)

That's not the simplest explaination. Why is every inperfection on Earth the result of a vast conspiracy involving millions of people? It gets harder and harder to keep something secret as you add more and more people to the process, and for energy companies to keep something secret would be impossible. The simpler explaination is that it is very difficult to solve the problem and that nobody has perfected a solution yet. Oil is essentially the concentrated byproduct of millions of years of biomatter. The energy that is in oil is solar energy collected by a million or so years' worth of plant and animol life, concentrated into a very dense package. The problem 'clean alternative fuels' keep running in to is that they keep trying different ways of trying the same less concentrated solar energy. You can put solar collectors on a car, and can indeed get the same power output from solar as you can from gas, but the problem is that the power input for solar is in real time wheras for gas more time was available to make the oil. Burning various plants is also trying to use solar energy in essence. Here you can make up the power input gap by increasing the surface area of the plants you intend to burn. However, a good way to guess how much this would require is: say you have a certain oil field of certain surface area which took a thousand years to form, which will satisfy energy needs for a year. To match that energy in corn, plankton, solar panels, giant rubber tree plants, or any other cleaver method of getting power from the Sun within a year, you would need to cover about a thousand times the surface area of the oil deposit. By real life figures, we simply don't have enough surface area on Earth to fuel all energy needs by burning any plant. The only solution is to stop trying to draw power from the Sun, and the only way to do that is Nuclear. You can't make a Nuclear car, so you'd have to use Hydrogen which you could get from electrolysis powered by a Nuclear plant. The US didn't think about using plankton essentially because we learned our lesson from trying corn. Spain is simply being arrogant enough not to learn from our mistakes.

I remember reading about another case where a doctor botched a cir!@#$%^&*cision. In that case they simply gave the child a sex change - they probably will consider doing the same thing here.

I will point out that this is a misuse of the word "mutant". Mutants by definition have abnormal DNA, while the DNA of the fetus was healthy and actually identical to the hosts'. I don't know why this happens more often in India. Just a few weeks ago a girl with 8 limbs was operated on, where the excess limbs were removed (too bad they could just make the extra limbs fuctional - then the girl would have an almost certain future of becoming an evil supervillian who could rule the world). Both conditions are actually cases of siamese twins joined really close together.

Astro, I'm ~always~ the most hated player in the game. The big question I have for JDS though: Will you play the new RPG that was discussed if and when that is installed?

Well, when you left people were still in the clan, so I figured it must have been some kind of mistake. Oh, back to the topic though...you can get rid of the negative income faster if you m!@#$%^&* or get massed depending on whether your mercs are offensive or defensive.

Well, just don't blame me, because I haven't touched you sound.

The issue has been dealt with. By the way, the IP addressed used by 2moons, subsequently banned, was linked to Emblazon, so you might not see him around for a while...

For reference, I'm still marking sound's tallies as Forsaken Commanders tallies. Hot Dog is the one scoring unclaimed.

Well, Sabotage isn't quite the same as when you were playing. First off, when you were playing the round was one month long, and sab pretty much sucked during the first month. The other difference is Sentry is now atleast a small factor in what can be done. On one hand I was able to destroy Astro and Falcoknight with sabotage, but on the other hand it barely put a dent in the war machines of rasta and JDS.

That verse comes immediately after the one where wives are told to respect their husbands. Obviously the statement is grossly taken out of context when used by people like SeVeR...I figured it was obvious enough that it didn't need mentioned.

The difference between having mistresses and polygamy being official is that the former is the case of somebody doing something wrong, and in the latter the process is regarded as virtuous. So then why is it that wealthy women don't take on multiple poor husbands? Poverty line my !@#$%^&*, I didn't say that they would be rich or as well off financially, I said that the women would still be able to get food and shelter. I was thinking more along the lines of Saudi Arabia anyway. Its not like either Iran or Saudi Arabia are lacking the natural resources to become wealthy countries. The reason that 40% of Iran is below the poverty line is because their culture is backwards. So, poverty is not a proper excuse to justify culture being backwards because it is the backwards culture which creates the poverty in the first place!!! (You and your circular arguements) When did Christianity stop women from dressing the way they wanted to dress? Even in the Victorian Era, women dressed the way they did moreso to emulate their queen than due to any outside factor. Its the same thing with the infamous corset...they wore them to keep up with fashion, not because lack of wearing one would result in some mob being formed. I guess I can admit that Christianity did provide a moral structure enough that women didn't want to be called '!@#$%^&*s', but that's radically different from how the burka is enforced by the sword. Well, you do have me there...I'm not an 'expert' on Islamic Culture. I'm a scientist, not a historian. I have studied Islamic and European history more than other histories however, and I keep finding that the more I learn about Europe, the more I understand what caused so many people to sail accrossed the oceans to get away from it, and the more I learn about the Islamic world, the more I realize that they are just plain insane.

No, Kings indulged in mistresses. It was considered an immoral practice which they could get away with. The Caliph's Harems were an official state installment...they would have an actual building devoted to it and everything. Not only that, but the harem actually replaced the queen. Yeah, sure polygamy isn't wrong at all. Its a legitimate process between a consenting adult and four or five teenage girls pressured into it by their parents. And this is great - I produce an example which occurs in the real world, and you cite some hypothetical case in which the hypothetical survival depends upon multiple women marrying one man. Look, muslim countries are generally second world, and certainly don't have throngs of starving masses. The way polygamy works in the real world is that you get one man with power, and neighbors who want to curry his favor will give their daughters to him. It has nothing to do with the needs of the individuals; its about the father's greed and the polygamists' lust. Sure, dressing 'modestly' and wearing a burka are the same thing. There certainly isn't a middle ground between showing one's whole cleavage in public and not showing one's face. Besides, Timothy said the women should do it themselves. He didn't say that it should be forced upon them by the state. That website is english. The laws are different in the east, but I will admit that generally the places where that happens are remote tribes with little internet access.

And JDS's posts consist of a single sentence that took three seconds to write and with far less thought than that put into them. (Where's Veg when you need him? If JDS continues along this line of stupidy and gets that warn meter all the way to the right, the RPG would start getting a lot easier ) Conservative and liberal are relative. If Roe vs. Wade was moderate than we would indeed have a conservative court. However, I'd say its a radical left-wing decision given how many people's throughts it got rammed down. I mean sorry, for digressing, but the question you asked was boring. I think that states should be able to decide almost any issue, and that the federal government should be limited to foreign relations, inalienable rights, and the basic domestic policies needed to keep the union together. That being said, I'd actually say that abortion is either way an inalienable rights issue, and I will admit that is the Supreme Court's juristiction, as majority rule should not be enough to overcome an inalienable right. I am however frustrated that those idiots put 'privacy' before 'life'. Thus, abortion should be a federal issue. Besides a statewide ban on abortion would do little good - they'd just fly to another state to have it done.

There are plenty of differences between the treatment of women by Christians vs. Muslims. At the same time England was crowning Queen Elizabeth, the Caliphs had given up the practice of marriage in favor of creating harems, which for the uneducated is a collection of female slaves which the caliph could all have relations with. Also, Islam has of yet not given up mainstream polygamy. (No, I'm not counting polygamy cults in Utah as 'mainstream' enough, as they are the outcasts of outcasts of outcasts, and people keep coming up with excuses to put them in jail.) Even the darkest day of the dark ages had knights who praticed a code of chivalry towards women, while in the brightest day of the Golden Age of Islam women are either property, one of twelve wives, sex slaves, or walking blankets. In Christian culture, if a man rapes a woman, the man has commited a felony. In Islamic culture if a man rapes a woman, the woman is considered a !@#$%^&* and executed - I will note that they are making progress here after the US invasion of Afghanistan, instead of executing the woman they now simply brand her a !@#$%^&* and convince her to commit suicide. Islam believes in practicing what they call 'female cir!@#$%^&*cision' at the age of around 10 or so, which is a proceedure which serves no benefit, and makes any and all sexual activity painful to the woman for life. Heck, they even plan on abusing women in the afterlife...they plan on getting their 72 virgins to abuse. Yes, I'm counting polygamous relationships as abusive in and of themselves. The plural side will always not have their emotional needs met. All in all, don't tell me there's no evidence, because there is lots of evidence. Now, back to my point. Just because somebody doesn't know enough about neither Christiany nor Islam to know of the evidence that they are different in, say treatment of women, does not imply that said evidence doesn't exist. This lack of understanding leads to crude generalizations which are just false.

You know, you keep it up and I'll sab you down to 11th place Astro. Total rank is the ranking of the average ranks. The people above you simply have a lower average than yours.

Actually, what I said was that it hasn't crippled JDS or rasta... and, I must admit its been a little harder on my end since you got your sentry.