🚀 go-pugleaf

Michael L Jacobs wrote:
> 
> I have a problem that only happens on certain saved games.  Sometimes
> when I try to save the game, the game crashes, and sometimes it saves
> without crashing, but then I cannot load that saved game.  It seems
> to stem from some corruption of a particular game since my roomate
> and I maintain seperate save game slots and while I cannot save, he can.
> (Although he had this problem with his first character, he suffers no
> more)  It seems to be related to Mage guild quests as in both of our
> cases the problem started when we saved the game after receiving a mage
> guild quest.  I patched the game with 179 from the copy I purchased
> this week, does anyone else have this problem?  Bugs like getting
> stuck in walls and falling through floors I can handle, but having
> to restart now 3 times due to inability to save the damn game is
> making me very very pissed.
> 
> Did Bethesda actually test this game at all???
> 
> --
>            The Horrors are coming....The Invae are here
>               The Truth is Out There...Trust No One
>                     "Never ask that question!" - Ambassador Kosh
>                Michael L Jacobs mja...@iastate.edu
> 

I have had the same thing happen to me several times. When I try to
reload the game, a message comes up saying something like--you drop to
the ground from exhaustion. If I go into my save game in the daggerfall
directory, most of the files aren't there, including savetree. So there
is no way to recover that saved game. I have never noticed if there is a
pattern to these crashes (mage guild quests etc.) but I did have one in
a dungeon during a main quest. There are also two people playing on my
machine, and he has never had this problem. Out of the six save game
slots, this only seems to happen on two of them. I don't think there is
a solution to the problem, as the crashes seem random. It's a real pain
when you only have access to three save game slots and you have to use
two in the dungeons just in case you crash while saving. Hopefully, this
is one of the problems Bethesda is working on.

Robyn

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg, Robyn Stephens <fde...@bconnex.net>
wrote:

>I have had the same thing happen to me several times. When I try to
>reload the game, a message comes up saying something like--you drop to
>the ground from exhaustion. If I go into my save game in the daggerfall
>directory, most of the files aren't there, including savetree. So there
>is no way to recover that saved game. I have never noticed if there is a
>pattern to these crashes (mage guild quests etc.) but I did have one in
>a dungeon during a main quest. There are also two people playing on my
>machine, and he has never had this problem. Out of the six save game
>slots, this only seems to happen on two of them. I don't think there is
>a solution to the problem, as the crashes seem random. It's a real pain
>when you only have access to three save game slots and you have to use
>two in the dungeons just in case you crash while saving. Hopefully, this
>is one of the problems Bethesda is working on.

No idea if this will work (I haven't run into this particular
problem), but have you tried deleting ALL the files in the directories
for those bad save game slots?

That might get rid of whatever is corrupted and let you start using
those slots again.

When you start the game, there are no files in a save game slot until
you actually use it, so clearing all the files should just put the
slot back to it's original condition.


Also, how are you fixed for free disk space?  I've noticed that those
save game directories keep taking up more and more space the longer
you play the game - wonder if that could be causing any problems?
(Just a wild guess, in case you hadn't looked into this already...)

-- 
Nick

Nick Old wrote:
 
> No idea if this will work (I haven't run into this particular
> problem), but have you tried deleting ALL the files in the directories
> for those bad save game slots?
> 
> That might get rid of whatever is corrupted and let you start using
> those slots again.
> 
> When you start the game, there are no files in a save game slot until
> you actually use it, so clearing all the files should just put the
> slot back to it's original condition.

That sounds like a good idea. I'll try it and see if it works.
 
> Also, how are you fixed for free disk space?  I've noticed that those
> save game directories keep taking up more and more space the longer
> you play the game - wonder if that could be causing any problems?
> (Just a wild guess, in case you hadn't looked into this already...)
> 
> --
> Nick

154mb free space on that drive so I don't think that is the problem

Robyn

On 3/17/2017 7:17 PM, metal...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Friday, November 8, 1996 at 3:00:00 AM UTC-5, Michael L Jacobs wrote:
>> I have a problem that only happens on certain saved games.  Sometimes
>> when I try to save the game, the game crashes, and sometimes it saves
>> without crashing, but then I cannot load that saved game.  It seems
>> to stem from some corruption of a particular game since my roomate
>> and I maintain seperate save game slots and while I cannot save, he can.
>> (Although he had this problem with his first character, he suffers no
>> more)  It seems to be related to Mage guild quests as in both of our
>> cases the problem started when we saved the game after receiving a mage
>> guild quest.  I patched the game with 179 from the copy I purchased
>> this week, does anyone else have this problem?  Bugs like getting
>> stuck in walls and falling through floors I can handle, but having
>> to restart now 3 times due to inability to save the damn game is
>> making me very very pissed.
>>
>> Did Bethesda actually test this game at all???
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>            The Horrors are coming....The Invae are here
>> 	      The Truth is Out There...Trust No One
>>                     "Never ask that question!" - Ambassador Kosh
>>                Michael L Jacobs mja...@iastate.edu
>
> Bethesda games are almost always a buggy mess, they test them, but barely.
>
You're responding with that to a 21 year old post?

-- 
Running the rec.arts.TV Channels Watched Survey.
Winter 2016 survey began Dec 01 and will end Feb 28

On Fri, 17 Mar 2017 20:01:08 -0700, Dimensional Traveler
<dtr...@sonic.net> wrote:

>You're responding with that to a 21 year old post?

I noticed that it is always gmail users who do that. Anyone know why?

Mike S. <Mik...@nowhere.com> looked up from reading the entrails of the
porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs say:

>On Fri, 17 Mar 2017 20:01:08 -0700, Dimensional Traveler
><dtr...@sonic.net> wrote:
>
>>You're responding with that to a 21 year old post?
>
>I noticed that it is always gmail users who do that. Anyone know why?

Because they're using google-groups, so of course they are google
everything, because that's the way google wants it.
One unified account for everything they offer, the better to keep track
of everything you look at so they can market at you more efficiently.

Combine that with google changing the way google groups displays things
so it's not actually that easy to see the date, and of course you get
idiots responding to decade(s) old posts, because that's what google
intended with the format change.
Make it seem like this thing they offer actually still has traffic by
obscuring the fact the posts are actually ancient, all to make it seem
like you get more with google.

Google dropped the "don't be evil" bit from their corporate culture a
long time ago.   I wouldn't be at all surprised if "Darth" was an
official job title at google these days.

Xocyll
-- 
I don't particularly want you to FOAD, myself. You'll be more of 
a cautionary example if you'll FO And Get Chronically, Incurably, 
Painfully, Progressively, Expensively, Debilitatingly Ill. So 
FOAGCIPPEDI. -- Mike Andrews responding to an idiot in asr 

On Sat, 18 Mar 2017 06:33:42 -0400, Mike S. <Mik...@nowhere.com>
wrote:

>On Fri, 17 Mar 2017 20:01:08 -0700, Dimensional Traveler
><dtr...@sonic.net> wrote:
>
>>You're responding with that to a 21 year old post?
>
>I noticed that it is always gmail users who do that. Anyone know why?

They use Google Groups.

Google Groups, among other things, contains an archive of all Usenet
posts (well, big-8 newsgroups anyway) and has a Usenet gateway. What
it does not have is a very good interface that makes it evident that
some of these posts are five, ten, or twenty years old. So people
start reading some of these older groups - often re-directed there by
a search query - and think the comments are new, and respond as they
would to any new post, unaware that they are necro-posting.

Google is aware of the problem (I am sure I am not the only one to
have sent them an email about the issue) but apparently refuses to do
anything with it. I wish they'd give the Usenet archive to somebody
like archive.org and then kill their usenet gateway entirely, since it
just causes confusion.

With that said, I think the better option is not to chastise
googlegroups posters for their error but instead welcome them to the
group, try to answer their question, and only then explain the problem
(and possible solutions). Snarky answers just sour them on the Usenet
experience and we could use all the traffic we can get here ;-)

And the poster is correct; Bethesda games /have/ always been very
buggy. Daggerfall was the absolute worst of all their games, though;
it was so bad they included cheat codes in the game so players could
get past the broken parts of the game. I am not sure if this is a
fault of the expansiveness of their worlds and complex interactions of
its various systems that make comprehensive testing impossible, or
just bad coding practices at Bethesda HQ (or possibly an intended
feature to differentiate their games from everyone else? :-) but
Bethesda is famous for its roster of bugs. 

They've gotten a lot better about it, though; Skyrim still had a lot
of bugs but most of them were fairly minor in comparison. You could
actually finish the game without it crashing on you! l-)

Anyway, to the original googlegroups poster, welcome to Usenet; thanks
for your "insightful" comment (hey, some snarky is expected as part of
the usenet experience). As noted, you are responding to a 21 year old
post but that's not your fault. However, in future you may be better
of using a proper Usenet client and provider; I recommend
http://www.eternal-september.org/ (it's free!). Also, you're likely to
find more traffic on c.s.i.p.rpg's sister newsgroup,
comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action (which, despite its name, accepts
discussion on all genres of game, not just action titles)

On Sat, 18 Mar 2017 09:34:04 -0400, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallsh...@gmail.com> wrote:

>And the poster is correct; Bethesda games /have/ always been very
>buggy. Daggerfall was the absolute worst of all their games, though;
>it was so bad they included cheat codes in the game so players could
>get past the broken parts of the game. I am not sure if this is a
>fault of the expansiveness of their worlds and complex interactions of
>its various systems that make comprehensive testing impossible,

This.

>just bad coding practices at Bethesda HQ (or possibly an intended
>feature to differentiate their games from everyone else? :-) but
>Bethesda is famous for its roster of bugs. 

Most of Bethesda's *action* games that I've played (admittedly not
all) have been better than average in QA out the door.

Because Bethesda is most known for their open-world RPGs, you're right
that they've come known for bugs.  

It's exactly your first guess.  In software development, the more
effort you put into trying to create an open game with that sense of
"anything can happen" (whether its regarding physics, or how quests
are completed, the degree of variation of interaction with NPCs or the
environment), the more permissive the game is with possible ways to
play it, the greater the exponential expansion of possible test cases.
At some point when you make the game big enough to give players what
they've been asking for, the cost of play-testing with 100% coverage
(particularly on multiple platforms) becomes outside of the realms of
human possibilities, both in terms of time and cost.

A directed or guided experience that doesn't let the player just go
anywhere and do anything is much easier to test.  Multiplayer games
are harder and costlier than a directed single player game because of
course the unexpected network conditions that can occur in an online
game, but because the playing field is usually limited to a map, it's
not as difficult to QA as a huge open world RPG, where something as
simple as the character attributes or loadout of a player can invoke
strange consequences in an actual play test session that would not be
detectable with standard unit-testing practices, or any other method
other than the remote chance that the play tester happened to build
and progress their character the exact same way, make the exact same
choices, and follow the exact same sequence of keystrokes/mouse moves
with the exact same timing.  

In reality, typical play testing can eliminate a huge number of
problems, and sometimes it's amazing it all works as well as it does.
But usually that last 5% of bugs are the ones that take up 95% of the
testing time to investigate, reproduce and fix.  Then, when less than
1% of players are ever likely to encounter that bug, some reasonable
judgement calls have to be made.

Thank you Xocyll and Spalls for the explanations! I was genuinely
curious about that.

Spalls Hurgenson <spallsh...@gmail.com> looked up from reading the
entrails of the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs
say:

>On Sat, 18 Mar 2017 06:33:42 -0400, Mike S. <Mik...@nowhere.com>
>wrote:
>
>>On Fri, 17 Mar 2017 20:01:08 -0700, Dimensional Traveler
>><dtr...@sonic.net> wrote:
>>
>>>You're responding with that to a 21 year old post?
>>
>>I noticed that it is always gmail users who do that. Anyone know why?
>
>They use Google Groups.
>
>Google Groups, among other things, contains an archive of all Usenet
>posts (well, big-8 newsgroups anyway) and has a Usenet gateway. What
>it does not have is a very good interface that makes it evident that
>some of these posts are five, ten, or twenty years old. So people
>start reading some of these older groups - often re-directed there by
>a search query - and think the comments are new, and respond as they
>would to any new post, unaware that they are necro-posting.
>
>Google is aware of the problem (I am sure I am not the only one to
>have sent them an email about the issue) but apparently refuses to do
>anything with it. I wish they'd give the Usenet archive to somebody
>like archive.org and then kill their usenet gateway entirely, since it
>just causes confusion.

Google *caused* the problem and almost certainly did so deliberately.
Deja-Vu's layout was better and that was the original layout G-G had,
and then google changed it to make it harder to search for things,
harder to sort and much harder to see when things were posted.

>With that said, I think the better option is not to chastise
>googlegroups posters for their error but instead welcome them to the
>group, try to answer their question, and only then explain the problem
>(and possible solutions). Snarky answers just sour them on the Usenet
>experience and we could use all the traffic we can get here ;-)
>
>And the poster is correct; Bethesda games /have/ always been very
>buggy. Daggerfall was the absolute worst of all their games, though;
>it was so bad they included cheat codes in the game so players could
>get past the broken parts of the game. I am not sure if this is a
>fault of the expansiveness of their worlds and complex interactions of
>its various systems that make comprehensive testing impossible, or
>just bad coding practices at Bethesda HQ (or possibly an intended
>feature to differentiate their games from everyone else? :-) but
>Bethesda is famous for its roster of bugs. 

Well they have always pushed the limits way beyond what other companies
even dreamed of doing.

Because of hardware limitations (and cash flow limitations) I didn't buy
Daggerfall right away, not getting it until after patch .213 was out and
I can recall only one thing crashing my game ever.
The Vampire bug;  If you got the vampire dream meaning you were
infected, where you died determined what "tribe" of vampire you became,
and one of the 44 regions was apparently unlinked/forgotten, so if you
were there, the game crashed instead of you dying and being reborn.

>They've gotten a lot better about it, though; Skyrim still had a lot
>of bugs but most of them were fairly minor in comparison. You could
>actually finish the game without it crashing on you! l-)

Skyrim was a *lot* less in everything but graphics - more along the
lines of what other companies always offered.
Massively smaller world and almost no customization, vs the custom
spells and item and even *class* of Daggerfall, and a world that would
almost fit inside one of Daggerfall's dungeons (exaggeration sure, but
not a huge exaggeration.)

You could *walk* across the entire region in a very short time - a
region, that if you look at a map of Tamriel, is supposed to be the same
size as that covered in Daggerfall.
Daggerfall was the size of Turkey,) and Skyrim was 4km by 4km box.
[Ok yes a great deal of that was empty space and boringly randomized
stuff, but it was there, and you could walk across it.

Daggerfall had actual travel times, banks that meant something (gold is
heavy and you got letters of credit, just like people did in our past)
house ownership - and not "oh you did me a favor/quest line and now I
will permit you to buy *that* house" but rather you're at the bank and
they have a list of local houses for sale, buy as many as you like and
can afford, and oh yes, you can buy a boat too (can't sail it anywhere,
but you can have it and store stuff on it.)
Horse, horse and cart for extra storage, loading stuff onto your horse
or cart from the dungeon without leaving the dungeon.
Climbing, flying, and other skills and spells that vanished from the
later games as they simplified things for consoles.
Oh yeah, the biggie - that everyone did not know how to pick locks, only
thief types did - magic users used magic to open locks and big burly
warriors smashed things open.   Realism that is sorely lacking since -
Bethesda now would have the Incredible Hulk, when faced with a locked,
flimsy, hollow-core modern interior door with a structural strength
little more than tissue paper, stop and get out lock picks to get
through.

When it came to depth of things, Daggerfall was an ocean and Skyrim was
a puddle on the sidewalk.  A pretty puddle, but a puddle nonetheless.
Yeah it was buggy, but no other company ever even tried to make
something that deep and complex.

It was a single player rpg on a 486, running on DOS, that was bigger
than some, if not all, MMORPGs today - you have to give them credit for
even trying to build that.

If my math is right, Daggerfall has over 1000x the land area of Elder
Scrolls Online. (Turkey is 783,000 square km and ESO is 27x27, or 729
square km.)

It's the only game in which I ever felt a real sense of scale, that no,
you cannot walk across the world an a handful of minutes.
Use fast travel or spend literal weeks getting there in real time.

In Skyrim you had fast travel but unless it was an annoying walk (like
up that mountain) there was just no point, since you could run from one
end of the *country* to the other in under 10 minutes.

Even the Duchy of Grand Fenwick was twice that size.

>Anyway, to the original googlegroups poster, welcome to Usenet; thanks
>for your "insightful" comment (hey, some snarky is expected as part of
>the usenet experience). As noted, you are responding to a 21 year old
>post but that's not your fault. However, in future you may be better
>of using a proper Usenet client and provider; I recommend
>http://www.eternal-september.org/ (it's free!). Also, you're likely to
>find more traffic on c.s.i.p.rpg's sister newsgroup,
>comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action (which, despite its name, accepts
>discussion on all genres of game, not just action titles)

Xocyll
-- 
I don't particularly want you to FOAD, myself. You'll be more of 
a cautionary example if you'll FO And Get Chronically, Incurably, 
Painfully, Progressively, Expensively, Debilitatingly Ill. So 
FOAGCIPPEDI. -- Mike Andrews responding to an idiot in asr 

On Mon, 20 Mar 2017 07:34:35 -0400, Xocyll <Xoc...@gmx.com> wrote:

>You could *walk* across the entire region in a very short time - a
>region, that if you look at a map of Tamriel, is supposed to be the same
>size as that covered in Daggerfall.
>Daggerfall was the size of Turkey,) and Skyrim was 4km by 4km box.
>[Ok yes a great deal of that was empty space and boringly randomized
>stuff, but it was there, and you could walk across it.

This is a big deal to me. A very big deal. I want my game worlds
created by human beings, not by programming algorithms. I do not place
the same priority on game world size that you do. Not in single player
games anyway. 

With that said, I already know without having even played it yet, that
Daggerfall is a better game then Arena. How much so, remains to be
seen. For me, it will depend entirely on how much depth Daggerfall has
to go along with its breadth. It's that simple.

Mike S. <Mik...@nowhere.com> looked up from reading the entrails of the
porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs say:

>On Mon, 20 Mar 2017 07:34:35 -0400, Xocyll <Xoc...@gmx.com> wrote:
>
>>You could *walk* across the entire region in a very short time - a
>>region, that if you look at a map of Tamriel, is supposed to be the same
>>size as that covered in Daggerfall.
>>Daggerfall was the size of Turkey,) and Skyrim was 4km by 4km box.
>>[Ok yes a great deal of that was empty space and boringly randomized
>>stuff, but it was there, and you could walk across it.
>
>This is a big deal to me. A very big deal. I want my game worlds
>created by human beings, not by programming algorithms. I do not place
>the same priority on game world size that you do. Not in single player
>games anyway. 

It's not the size exactly, it's the complexity and the feeling that the
world does NOT revolve around you.
Most of the world will never even hear of the nameless hero who did the
quest, and almost all RPGs do it the opposite way - where everyone knows
who you are even though you've never been there before.

Daggerfall's size made you feel like you were in a world, and
insignificant to that world.

Compare that to Skyrim, where you are damn near instantly THE HERO,
getting aid and quests from everyone as you stride through the world 10
league tall (virtually).

"Oh look, the hero has come and will save us from the horrible foozle,
we can tell this from their incredibly heroic visage that shines through
the mists even though they're dressed like a common beggar who has
apparently been swimming in a sewer."

Vs the more realistic "who is this guy that's dressed like a beggar?
Chase him off he stinks and looks like he might steal something."


Dunno about you, but I'd rather play the random guy who got dragooned
into this hero business then the Legendary Hero Prophesied to Save The
World!   There's far more opportunity for ME to define my character when
I'm not being written into a pre-defined role someone else dreamed up -
and wrote dialog for - and wrote predefined responses for my character
that suite THEIR play style, - and wrote predefined scenarios that force
me to do things that MY CHARACTER would not do, but theirs would etc.


The size also made travel times important - you could fast travel (in
two different ways - fastest travel with the chance of getting attacked,
and via safe trade routes, staying overnight in Inns, etc, which took
considerably longer.)

At one point you have a meeting, and if you miss that meeting, the main
quest is over.  
Not the usual way these days where they will put their life on hold
indefinitely until you show up, they set the meeting and if you don't
show up, that's it.
I exploit this in fallout4, when Preston Garvey sends you off to help
some group somewhere - if you never go eventually it will fail, but
there's no actual consequence.  If you go an help, you then have to go
back and report that you helped them - but there is no time limit, you
can wait years before reporting back and there is no blowback at all.

Become a werewolf or a vampire (actually there's 9 bloodlines) or get
cured when you find out you are infected.)
Probably the coolest way ever to tell you you are infected to - no popup
dialog on screen telling you you are infected (and how would you
instantly know anyway?) but instead a dream the first time you sleep
after getting infected - 3 days from infection to change, so if you plan
to get cured, head to a temple, and OH LOOK, travel times and the sheer
size of the world are suddenly very important again - can you get to a
temple in time?

Vampire/werewolf hunters that WILL come after you - giving you a quest
to get cured, but if you don't they will come after you in waves.

Oh and as a vampire you technically died, so all your guild affiliations
and reputations with various groups reset back to neutral/zero.


If you want one bit of advice - join the mages guild and work up to the
rank where you get access to the guild teleporter (he will send you
wherever you want to go.)
Learn the mark and return spells.
Set a mark at his location (you can use the return spell to return to
your marked location.)
You can then get a quest from anyone, anywhere, recall to your mark in
front of the guild teleporter, get the teleporter to send you to where
the quest destination is, do it, hunt the guy, explore the dungeon,
whatever, then recall back and get the teleporter to send you back to
the quest giver's location (or at least the same city.)

This also makes it easier to not get infected with lycanthropy or
vampirism since you can always get to a temple in time, and/or so you
can join the bloodline of choice if you choose to become a vampire (the
info on the wiki says it's determined by the location you get infected
in, but unless there has been a patch after .213, it's actually
determined by the location you die in.

Note you cannot fast travel in the daytime when a vampire, even if you
have health regen items that will keep you alive standing in the sun -
it does not count them while doing the fast travel calculation so you
would always die.   Similarly the guild teleporter won't send you
anywhere in daytime, nor can you wait to quickly pass time while you are
in sunlight.

>With that said, I already know without having even played it yet, that
>Daggerfall is a better game then Arena. How much so, remains to be
>seen. For me, it will depend entirely on how much depth Daggerfall has
>to go along with its breadth. It's that simple.

Everything Arena had, Daggerfall has more of.

More items to equip and possibly enchant.
More ways to enchant something, IE health or mana regeneration that only
happens at night, or during a certain phase of the moon or ...
The more powerful souls you capture and use to power enchantments having
their own inherent advantages and disadvantages. (IE use a Daedra
Seducer soul and whatever else you enchant on the item it also boosts
your reputation with everyone, but the item also degrades in sunlight,
gives you bad reactions from animals and you take damage if you enter
holy places, and if you don't actually use the item at least once a
week, it will start leeching health from you.)

Get to a walled city after dark when the gates are closed, wait until
daytime, or climb the walls if your skill is high enough or levitate
over them.

Got caught stealing, get up on a roof and run away jumping from roof to
roof and no silly nonsense making the guards immune to damage because
it's not fair that you have a ranged weapon and they don't so you're not
allowed to hit them (Elder Scrolls Online does that - in the set piece
fights of quests, if the baddie cannot reach you the fight resets.)

I would absolutely love a modern remake.
Hrm and with the landscape generation that No Man's Sky has - if
something like that were used the procedurally generated landscape would
be more interesting.   Daggerfall's was very flat - but then it was a
DOS game.

Xocyll
-- 
I don't particularly want you to FOAD, myself. You'll be more of 
a cautionary example if you'll FO And Get Chronically, Incurably, 
Painfully, Progressively, Expensively, Debilitatingly Ill. So 
FOAGCIPPEDI. -- Mike Andrews responding to an idiot in asr 

On Tue, 21 Mar 2017 09:00:03 -0400, Xocyll <Xoc...@gmx.com> wrote:

>At one point you have a meeting, and if you miss that meeting, the main
>quest is over.  

You and I touched on this before, we'll agree to disagree on this one.
The player should always be able to finish the game, no matter what
choices he makes, period. You describe this as  a positive. It is a
negative to me. But I appreciate the reminder. I will keep it in mind
if or when I get around to playing Daggerfall.

>Everything Arena had, Daggerfall has more of.

I know this. This is why I know Daggerfall is a better game. Well
that, and that the controls are better in Daggerfall.  The things you
mention here in your post (other then what I quoted above) does sound
interesting. I just hope Daggerfall does not feel overly generic the
way Arena did. That was Arena's biggest failing for me. And why I got
bored of it after10 or so levels.

But while I have your attention, what is your opinion on Daggerfall's
automap? Reviews I read of this game, even when very positive, often
complains about the automap making dungeon exploring more confusing
then it needs to be. Did you ever get lost in the dungeons? Did the
automap suffice for you?

On 3/18/2017 6:34 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
> On Sat, 18 Mar 2017 06:33:42 -0400, Mike S. <Mik...@nowhere.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 17 Mar 2017 20:01:08 -0700, Dimensional Traveler
>> <dtr...@sonic.net> wrote:
>>
>>> You're responding with that to a 21 year old post?
>>
>> I noticed that it is always gmail users who do that. Anyone know why?
>
> They use Google Groups.
>
> Google Groups, among other things, contains an archive of all Usenet
> posts (well, big-8 newsgroups anyway) and has a Usenet gateway. What
> it does not have is a very good interface that makes it evident that
> some of these posts are five, ten, or twenty years old. So people
> start reading some of these older groups - often re-directed there by
> a search query - and think the comments are new, and respond as they
> would to any new post, unaware that they are necro-posting.
>
> Google is aware of the problem (I am sure I am not the only one to
> have sent them an email about the issue) but apparently refuses to do
> anything with it. I wish they'd give the Usenet archive to somebody
> like archive.org and then kill their usenet gateway entirely, since it
> just causes confusion.
>
> With that said, I think the better option is not to chastise
> googlegroups posters for their error but instead welcome them to the
> group, try to answer their question, and only then explain the problem
> (and possible solutions). Snarky answers just sour them on the Usenet
> experience and we could use all the traffic we can get here ;-)
>
> And the poster is correct; Bethesda games /have/ always been very
> buggy. Daggerfall was the absolute worst of all their games, though;
> it was so bad they included cheat codes in the game so players could
> get past the broken parts of the game. I am not sure if this is a
> fault of the expansiveness of their worlds and complex interactions of
> its various systems that make comprehensive testing impossible, or
> just bad coding practices at Bethesda HQ (or possibly an intended
> feature to differentiate their games from everyone else? :-) but
> Bethesda is famous for its roster of bugs.
>
> They've gotten a lot better about it, though; Skyrim still had a lot
> of bugs but most of them were fairly minor in comparison. You could
> actually finish the game without it crashing on you! l-)
>
> Anyway, to the original googlegroups poster, welcome to Usenet; thanks
> for your "insightful" comment (hey, some snarky is expected as part of
> the usenet experience). As noted, you are responding to a 21 year old
> post but that's not your fault. However, in future you may be better
> of using a proper Usenet client and provider; I recommend
> http://www.eternal-september.org/ (it's free!). Also, you're likely to
> find more traffic on c.s.i.p.rpg's sister newsgroup,
> comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action (which, despite its name, accepts
> discussion on all genres of game, not just action titles)

The funny thing is for awhile they had a policy that wouldn't let you 
post to a thread that was started more than 30 days ago.  With the 
length of some of the threads that was pretty limiting, I complained 
about it, and amazingly within a couple months they changed it back. 
Perhaps they got a lot of complaints about that.  Perhaps something more 
reasonable like can't reply to a *post* that's more than a year old 
would be better.

I actually like using GG for reading/posting as it keeps track across 
multiple devices what I've read.  The tree function isn't very good, and 
it's got some format issues that make it hard for some people to read 
and it actually listens to archive request so I wasn't seeing Zag's 
posts so I finally got around to getting a newsreader set up again, and 
instead use remote desktop to go to where I have it set up, which is 
still a bit less convenient.

- Justisaur

Mike S. <Mik...@nowhere.com> looked up from reading the entrails of the
porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs say:

>On Tue, 21 Mar 2017 09:00:03 -0400, Xocyll <Xoc...@gmx.com> wrote:
>
>>At one point you have a meeting, and if you miss that meeting, the main
>>quest is over.  
>
>You and I touched on this before, we'll agree to disagree on this one.
>The player should always be able to finish the game, no matter what
>choices he makes, period. You describe this as  a positive. It is a
>negative to me. But I appreciate the reminder. I will keep it in mind
>if or when I get around to playing Daggerfall.
>
>>Everything Arena had, Daggerfall has more of.
>
>I know this. This is why I know Daggerfall is a better game. Well
>that, and that the controls are better in Daggerfall.  The things you
>mention here in your post (other then what I quoted above) does sound
>interesting. I just hope Daggerfall does not feel overly generic the
>way Arena did. That was Arena's biggest failing for me. And why I got
>bored of it after10 or so levels.
>
>But while I have your attention, what is your opinion on Daggerfall's
>automap? Reviews I read of this game, even when very positive, often
>complains about the automap making dungeon exploring more confusing
>then it needs to be. Did you ever get lost in the dungeons? Did the
>automap suffice for you?

Daggerfall and Descent had the same problem - 3d landscapes = 3d maps
and 3dmaps are NOT easy to read.

Certainly possible to read but not easy since they are not limited to a
grid, or tower block flat floors each the same as the level below type
thing - more like mining tunnels that follow the ore veins wherever they
go and loop and twist.

It was actually quite easy to get lost in both games, that was actually
part of the charm in a sense - the world was NOT organized to make
things easier for YOU, it was what it was and you had to deal with it.

That's how _worlds_ are, as opposed to the modern take on it where the
world is organized to be best for you with pointers right to your
destination and helpful natives ready to tell you exactly what you need
to know even after you slaughtered their entire village.

Xocyll
-- 
I don't particularly want you to FOAD, myself. You'll be more of 
a cautionary example if you'll FO And Get Chronically, Incurably, 
Painfully, Progressively, Expensively, Debilitatingly Ill. So 
FOAGCIPPEDI. -- Mike Andrews responding to an idiot in asr 

On Thu, 23 Mar 2017 12:46:08 -0400, Xocyll <Xoc...@gmx.com> wrote:

>That's how _worlds_ are, as opposed to the modern take on it where the
>world is organized to be best for you with pointers right to your
>destination and helpful natives ready to tell you exactly what you need
>to know even after you slaughtered their entire village.
>
>Xocyll

Thank you. I suspect I will find it more frustrating then charming but
we'll see.