Hey Patrick Combs. I used to read his stuff back when his site was still called

www.myboot.com

He had a great novel going on there called "She hates my futon". Good stuff. I see the site has been taken down now. This bank story is pretty old already, he wrote that, what, four or so years ago.

He's a good writer, I wonder why he doesn't try to get something published. He'd easily make it.

Creston

I read the whole thing, and the longer it went on, the more interesting it got.

Yeah, but you can really tell that the guy is a public speaker... just the way he relates things. Like talking about walking on the beach, and what music he played at various times, etc. He's just selling himself really hard as "an average guy".

And it really shows how customer service takes a back seat sometimes

The most telling thing is that it shows how little people know of the law. The guy isn't a dumbass. He may've done it on a lark, but once it actually went through he started really doing his homework on what would happen. Calling the guy who wrote the book was pretty amazing IMO. Very ballsy. Which, as best I can tell, is basically what his speaking career is all about.

Anyway, they tried to intimidate him into giving in. He knew that he was in the clear, legally, and that even if they took him to court they'd lose. It's important to know these kinds of things. If you ever get into a situation where you may need a lawyer, remember -- the initial consultation is always free. And never call the hacks that are on TV.

The bank had a number of opportunities to do the right thing, and even turn it into a PR swing in their favor, but they wouldn't do it

Well, I'm guessing that if they admitted their mistake on paper then he could've used that in court (if it came to that). Not that they really had a court case to begin with.

As for the PR -- if they were about to merge with Wells Fargo then they couldn't do anything. Quiet period and all of that.

But yeah... companies are awfully stupid at times.

Nope, Gearbox does

But presumably they own OpFor as well? I wonder if Randy Pitchford's reading?! Blue Shift is, IMO, the better of the two expansions.

______________________
I don't see any connection to Vietnam, Walter.

am I to understand NY turned down Ortiz when they could've got him for a song??

George Steinbrenner wanted to sign him, but Brian Cashman 'convinced' him not to, since they already had Giambi and Nick Johnson (at the time), so they had no place to play him.

Which did make sense at the time, to be honest. And who would have expected Ortiz to go from a guy who hit 53 homeruns with the Twins in SIX YEARS, to a guy who hits 41 homeruns and drives in 130 PER YEAR.

But, ofcourse, nobody EVER mentions the possibility of steroids there. That's just switching to a hitter's ballpark, or something.

But hey, the Sox deserved it, the Yankees didn't, simple as that.

On that note, GOOOOO CARDINALS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Creston

Edit : Someone mentioned below that the ALCS was the world series, and that nothing could get that exciting.
I hate to be rude, but the ALCS was actually pisspoor baseball. From shite pitching to poor defense to no offense whatsoever, the only thing it had going for it was that it was the Sox vs the Yankees and that it was the biggest Gag Job in professional sports history. And that it lasted forever.

The excellent baseball was being played in the other series. Great pitching (with exception of Pete Munro), good batting, patient at-bats, perfect Small Ball, and just absolutely insane defense. Did anyone SEE that catch that Jim Edmons made in the early part of tonight's game? No 1 play of the year, especially considering that it basically gave the Cardinals the win.

Finally, for those of you who love the Yankees' current misery, I leave you with this absolute GEM from Bob Klapisch : The money is limitless, but what did it get Steinbrenner in 2004? For $184 million, the Yankees became the equivalent of a '70s-era gas guzzler -- huge and loud and impossible to ignore. But step on the pedal, as the Yankees did in Game 7, and there was nothing under the hood.




This comment was edited on Oct 22, 00:02.

He has been answering questions for the last day, its so long im only including his answers as, im sure you can figure out the questions or
just vist the site, also hope this isnt breaking any rules for long post here, dont want to get the BlueBoot
http://bloodlines.dilapidation.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=703
With the topic of "What the Hell is going on around here"

You only lose Humanity for draining someone dry in a 'Masquerade area' which are the 4 hubs of the game.
In combat areas you can drain away...

You always lose a point of humanity for killing someone in a Masquerade area, though there's a grace
period afterwards so if you're in a battle with the police, for instance, you don't lose all your humanity in a minute.

As far as the Sabbat and the Masquerade, I can't speak to the official PnP stance on that (maybe someone else could enlighten us)
but the way we portray them in Bloodlines is that while they scorn everything that the Camarilla stands for (including the Masquerade),
they still know that if humans believed vampires actually existed they would all be wiped out. So it's more of a practical thing for them,
but alot of them are very sloppy when it comes to the actual practice of keeping themselves hidden.

Yes, I was the Art Director on the original Fallout, and Tim, Jason, and I designed the main story and some of the new features for
FO2 before we left Interplay to form Troika Games.

There are four different levels of armor in the game, and they look different for every clan/gender.

We're estimating about a 40 hour game if you run through it as fast as possible, mainly concentrating on the main story arc.
If you do every possible side quest and explore everything possible, it's more like a 60 hour game.

The Gangrel can turn into a 'beast form' which kinda looks like a mutated giant man bat. That's the only creature that you can
turn into in Bloodlines. We originally had the form of a wolf as well, but there were too many issues with a four legged PC versus
a two legged one.

I haven't played HL2 yet, so I can't comment on our physics use vs theirs, but one reviewer who had already played around with
both said that our use of it wasn't as extensive as theirs, which is easy to believe. Since our game has alot more complexity
than HL2 (I'm assuming here, but I think it's a pretty safe assumption since you can only play one character in HL2, and
I'm not aware of a branching storyline, etc) we had to solidify our design earlier in the development cycle, before the physics
was 100% dependable. There are alot of physics objects to interact with in Bloodlines, they're just not as central to the game play.

Each clan has a specific set of four armors - light cloth, heavy cloth, light leather, and heavy leather, and each of these is one 'piece'.

man, you guys are keeping me busy.

The Ankh means that you have a targeted Discipline readied, and if you were to trigger it, that would be the person you'd effect/hit.

The floating numbers indicate damage you're doing to them, and they can be turned off.

the gangrel have a tendency to hunch over and look a bit animalistic. This was purely an artistic choice on our part to convey their
animal like nature, it has no effect on gameplay.

I wouldn't call our melee combat 'button mashing' (though some people might think that after watching my spastic playing style).
There's alot of different facets to all combat, including melee. You end up strategically using not only your Disciplines in conjunction
with your preferred style of combat, but there's also the feeding while in combat aspect of it as well.
For those that have better hand eye coordination than myself, there's also different 'moves' for melee, depending on which directional
movement button you push in conjunction with attacking, and you can also actively block. In addition to all of the above, if you get
enough successful hits on an opponent in quick succession you get to see a cool combo move for visual variety.

We have alot of ambient sounds in the game, and all the hubs have their own distinctive music (as well as different combat music)

Draken - all clans have access to all the feats, so you could create a very social gangrel

Acleacius - there are no 'quick switch' slots per say, but we have enabled the player to set up his own hot keys
(there's 10 of them available) enabling everything from weapons to blood packs at the hit of a key. The game pauses when you
bring up your inventory, hot key screen, character sheet, or quest log. When your hot key screen is up, you still have access
to your 'readied' discipline, so you could use that as an 'undocumented feature'. Sorry, not HUD scaling, but it's fairly unobtrusive.
I have played a Gangrel (and tested parts of the game with all the characters), but I'm really looking forward to playing through as a
Malkavian and as a Nosferatu, as they're the most extreme clans in terms of a totally different feeling experience.

Just so everyone knows, we're not ignoring the MP questions, we just can't go into any detail on the subject right now. Let me just
say that we didn't have enough resources to give it the attention it deserved. I really wish we could have delivered a great MP game
as well for the people who were waiting for it, but we simply could not do it. And asking for help from the community is not an option
for hundreds of reasons, most of them out of our control. And, as I've said before, we can't talk about the release of the modding tools,
that's between Valve and Activision.

Sugarmouse - It's hard to compare the size of the world to FO2 or BG2, or even GTA, as it's a totally different type of game world than
any of those games. All I can say is it's more than big enough. As far as freedom in this game, let me just say that fans of
Troika style RPGs will not be disappointed. I wouldn't kill Larry, he's got some good weapons to sell Smile

Laurna - no embracing NPCs, but there may be something similar to it...

Styler - You can theoretically play as a pure 'unarmed' character. I say theoretically because I don't know of anyone who has played
the whole game simply using hand to hand combat. The melee weapons are just too cool to pass up.
_________________
Leon
Art Director/Head Muckety Muck
Troika Games LLC

Some pretty good info here, once again appoligies about the length

This comment was edited on Oct 21, 22:33.

WTF am I gonna do all weekend?! Bah

Come do some roto-tilling in my back yard? It'll get you out of the house (and leave me free to do better things)...

Somehow, I don't see you jumping at the opportunity, though.



*************
* Warhawk *
*************

You're gonna regret this the rest of your life... both seconds of it.

Bah! The fan on my video card is going bad!
It is making it run hot if I do anything intensive, so I cant play any games until I get a new one

But fortunately all I had to do was ask EVGA (this morning) and they said via e-mail it went out today (though, not at any blazing fast delivery speed, but hey, it is free!

WTF am I gonna do all weekend?! Bah


_____
Enahs
That’s a deep kiss too, like the Europeans. You know the French they have to unhinge their jaw to show love.

Yeah, why don't I get access to Blue Shift with my Silver HL2 either? Does Valve not own it?

Nope, Gearbox does

And the way the Steam FAQ describes it, unless Gearbox ports it, it won't be showing up on Steam anytime soon (if at all).

Wonder how hard it would be for the community to port it, assuming Gearbox gave it's blessing?

Man 1, Bank 0. - Awesome story and storytelling!

Agreed. I read the whole thing, and the longer it went on, the more interesting it got. The guys' got balls, I'll say that. I'd be afraid of being sued to death. And it really shows how customer service takes a back seat sometimes, much to the customers dismay. The bank had a number of opportunities to do the right thing, and even turn it into a PR swing in their favor, but they wouldn't do it.

In case anyone missed it, on the last page of that story, there's a link to buy the guy's dvd, where he tells the whole story. Sounds like it'd be pretty funny...

www.muse.mu

Awesome story and storytelling!

I downloaded firefox after hearing people talk about it here, and it ownz! I had problems getting flash to work as well, so I just broke down and went to the macromedia website and downloaded it from there.

Nope, Gearbox does

-----
"I want my lamp back. I'm gonna need it to get out of this slimy mudhole."

"I wish Blue Shift would/could have been included for free in the HL games on Steam when I registered my old HL game like OpFor was."

Yeah, why don't I get access to Blue Shift with my Silver HL2 either? Does Valve not own it?

You can get one of those flying lawnmower things for only 90 bucks. I think I might order one sometime. http://www.flyingthingz.com/

heh, I saw one of those fly a while back on some TV show, they're a bit wobbly in flight but the damned thing DOES get up there.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
What Would Fred Do?

AHA!!

So it was FlashBlock all along - thought I had gotten rid of it, but I guess there were some remnants lying around... nuked my profile, and all is well again!

Thanks, Zathrus and Fang for the help

-----
"I want my lamp back. I'm gonna need it to get out of this slimy mudhole."

Boo-ya! 18 out of 18! The Zelda one didn't sound right though...maybe because I'm used to hearing music with it?

www.muse.mu

see my .sig.

Use your head, don't lose it - Don't feed the trolls!

Yep, that's the one thing Steam desperately needs a utility that will export games so you can burn them more easily. Exporting them as bin files would be nice.


"I never saw a dame yet that didn't understand a good slap in the mouth or a slug from a .45."
- Bogart, Play it Again Sam

Just finished replaying HL, OpFor and Blue Shift

I wish Blue Shift would/could have been included for free in the HL games on Steam when I registered my old HL game like OpFor was.

*************
* Warhawk *
*************

You're gonna regret this the rest of your life... both seconds of it.

Naw, I had already done that three times before I posted my first plea... but I'm pretty sure it's the culprit as well, so here's another question - how do you successfully uninstall the Flash plugin?

Well... on which OS?

On Windows it should be in \program files\mozilla firefox\plugins -- there are several files. GetFlash.exe, GetFlash.exe.manifest, and NPSWF32.dll. The last one is the actual plugin. I'm not sure what the other two do.

On Linux it's in a similar location in the firefox install dir, wherever that may be.

That said, I suspect your problem actually does have to do with Flashblock (or similar) from a previous install... and that Flashblock is wackily/partially installed in your new install. I can suggest a couple of things to try here, but I cannot promise that any will work (I have Flashblock working here, but I went through 0.8->0.9->1.0RC upgrade cycle).

First, and most radical, you can nuke your profile and start over. You'll lose your bookmarks (can be saved if you copy the bookmarks.html out first), cache, cookies, etc (also saveable, but harder). To do this you have to go to \documents and settings\your user name\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles -- note that Application Data is a hidden directory. You'll want to nuke the default directory under there... save the bookmarks, cookies, etc first if you want. What you're really after is getting rid of the stuff in the chrome directory and all the .js files. But I don't know how Firefox will respond if you delete only those. (To save bookmarks: bookmarks.html. Cookies: cookies.txt cookperm.txt. Form History: formhistory.dat Passwords: I don't know)

Second, and less radical, is to follow the manual uninstall directions on the Flashblock site. May work, may not. Don't know the URL offhand, sorry.

Third, and what seems to work for me, is to install the Show Old Extensions extension. Except that I don't know where you can get it now -- the homepage I have is defunct. It will let you re-enable Flashblock which will probably fix the problem you're having.

One of those should work... if you have the time and willingness, try them in reverse order. I'm pretty damn sure the first will work, but it's also rather drastic. It's also the easiest though, unless you've mucked about with about:config or the various .js/.rdf/.css files manually.


Edit: oh yeah, to install Show Old Extensions (if you can find it) you'll have to disable the whitelist in about:config
This comment was edited on Oct 21, 16:28.