Improved Anvil v5+ and BWL

[Nominar]

Argh, I just have to argue.

 

if time is just what clocks measure, how can clocks run slow?

Clocks don't run slow, only slower than other clocks. I know you meant that but that's what I also had in mind when I wrote "time is just what clocks measure". Time is relative; what makes your "faster" clock better than mine? Nothing. Why do different experiments give different results of a real physical thing called time? Time is just what clocks measure. Time isn't "real", you can't possibly travel back in time, we just have a series of events that happen in particular order.

 

Real physics does allow system A to measure a much shorter time duration than system B, but it's not trivial to do: either send system A off on a very fast (i.e. close-to-light-speed) round trip, or dump system A in a very strong (i.e., close-to-a-black-hole strong) gravitational field.

I actually know that and had that also in mind when I wrote what I did.

 

I'm ready to be face smacked with superior knowledge of physics.

[cmorgan]

The cool thing about folks who really get into their subject (and have to teach Oxford undergraduates) is that a challenge like that unleashes their inner teacher - which is way fun for them, and even more fun for the rest of us, who dabble at the edges of philosophy and physics like toddlers splashing in a play-pool. Especially as it will be awhile (next summer,beak, probably) before I can read The Grand Design...

 

... I'll take "fun discussions about the troubles of un-unified theoretical physics" for $200, please, DavidW (Jeopardy reference for the younger set. By the way, you have made a good stab at making this accessible to layfolk. "How I learned to stop worrying and love FAPP" - I could actually follow along with you until you hit decoherence and started using equations. Mostly, it made me want to read more, which beats 99% of the academic materials I have had to wade through.)

[Baronius' Coder]

EXTEND TOP is a citrolic pentameter opcode bilaterally confiscating the symphonic dialysis

of the optimal relationship bypassing the kinetic refinement. Weidu is an aurleanic

coresystem narbotically enhanced by eluviastic transparence. The triple code, at line

457.786 is phoenetically dynamic in relation to the metaphysical conversion rate of the

quadritic hemisphere. A biochemical analysis confirms the cessation of the quantam strings

at line 32.890754. Therefore the cerebral environment of crossimmobilization of the

portbearing synthesis is correct. Aquatic reverb is not fillament of legion mobility evident

of ryboric principles.

[geh4th]

Sorry to break into the technobabble discussion over temporal mechanics (this sounds like a Star Trek Voyager episode!) but I have an announcement that is way overdue.

 

Some time back I issued Sikret a private ultimatum that if he didn't release IA v6 to the public, I would.

 

I am completely justified in doing this for a multitude of reasons, if nothing else because Sikret and der Fuhrer (Baronius) betrayed the ever-shrinking Improved Anvil community itself when it went behind the financial "Iron Curtain" of Baronius' latest money-stealing scheme. The proof is (amazingly) still visible on the tiny bit of BWL that's still free:

 

"All Infinity Engine game mods are completely free for all visitors" (found here)

 

as well as this one:

 

"Note: consequently, as all donations cover costs, this does not change on the fact that all Infinity Engine game mods will remain completely public and free." (located here.)

 

As you can see, Sikret and Baronius have lied to you. (Please....try to contain your horrified gasps of shock.)

 

Sikret even lied to me and other testers in his own group when we challenged him on this, saying that Improved Anvil v6 HAD to be released as a freely available mod because it had been promised in public. He insisted that no such promise had been made. (Apparently he has trouble locating those two free links above.)

 

Over the past few months, I've done a lot of online research about the history of Sikret's ongoing war with the remainder of the modding community. Initially, I was on his side, mostly because I liked his mod and was ignorant of all his sordid history in the community. As my eyes opened, though, I realized that in ALL of his interpersonal battles (and there's a LOT of them!) there's only one common factor: Sikret. When a guy manages to alienate not one, not a few, but ALL of his contemporaries, it's clear that he is the problem.

 

I had the "honor" of experiencing first-hand Sikret's full measure of condescending, arrogant elitism as one of his testers, and I refused to take it. I was very outspoken in criticizing him when it was due, which was quite a lot. I put him in his place many times and openly told him that he was being a jerk, alienating his own players and testers (not to mention the BG2 community). I was initially trying to help him to see that he needed to change, but he just doesn't get it. He really thinks he's right and literally everyone else is wrong. He honestly believes that he is a genius and all the rest of us are stupid. He openly states that he thinks that all of YOU (modders) are not as smart as he is, and that all of your work is inferior. It's disgusting. Finally I'd had enough when that worthless piece of sh*t Baronius was allowed to personally attack me within the Improved Anvil testing group, and Sikret not only didn't stop it, he supported it. (if anyone has any questions about the validity of this, I have transcripts of the posts.)

 

I have a beta copy of Improved Anvil v6. It's a version that is just short of the initial not-so-public release. I will send this to anyone that PM's me and asks for it. I will also try to answer any questions that anyone might have.

 

I warned Sikret to fulfill the promises linked above, and he completely ignored me. All I am doing is fulfilling those promises for him.

[yarpen]

Why do you always do such an internet drama, guys? That's just ridiculous. I wasn't even aware of the fact that Improved Anvil was a mod worth of giving a shot. I remembered it as bugged piece of crap which granted HLAs to pirates from one of Athkatlan taverns. And +8 swords of Everything. Still, when someone wants cash for something like that... it's really strange for me who would buy a crap like this. -,- Okay, maybe I'm a fan of something what I call quality mods like Demi's works but hey, he didn't only spent hours of his life to revise whole BG2 but also created nice little community of folks who usually hang out in his topics (me, Ardanis, Salk, Dakk) and he really responses to someone suggestions. Even if it's me with thousands of my ideas from my ancient mods which were never published. So yeah, kudos for him.

 

What about Silkret? I hope he's poor, misunderstood guy who just wanted to create something huge (so yo, great and keep it on) but who thanks to bad influence became such an asshole ('stealing ideas' and stuff ... I'm still afraid of publishing my Potion of Acid Resistance BAM which looks similiar to IA's one, just because I've made it using Irfan View and Paint, probably as Silkret did). So don't be too hard on him guys. Well, I earned a bit of cash thanks to my works on Infinity Engine, after co-operation with CD-Project they paid me (even when I was slightly protesting ) but it was really nice feeling. But I still cannot imagine how can someone limit accessibility of his work to people, it just doesn't make sense for me as a term 'modder'. Hey, you're a modder, you've got passion to do something with old and rusty engine... for me it's obvious that he doesn't get a lot of cash from that so it's a sort of absurd for me.

 

On the other hand Baronius's practices when it's about Infinity Modding scene are dirty, and reeks of something awfull. But it's his place, his people. If he hasn't stolen rights to mods from modders, it means everything works fine there. And I'm sorry for people who host their mods there (especially Valiant and his excellent Tower of Deceiption), but that's their choice. BWL is the only modding community without 'filthy american influences', maybe some folks like it. For me it's fun to be here.

 

PS. Bigg, DavidW, Ardanis's discussion = <fap fap fap>

[lroumen]

The way I understood TS in BG was that there was an actual TS happening, except for some small space reserved for the caster and as spells begin to exit that space they slow down fast at first but decreasingly after that and they never truly get to the edge of that reserved space (except after and infinite amount of time). After TS expires they speed up. If the caster moves after casting a spell so would their field of normal time except in effect there's constantly a new field being generated so previously cast spells wouldn't be affected. I think this could be a good explanation as to why melee won't work, because same goes for your weapons: they slow down infinitely much at the edge and would possible be stuck there (because your space would be shaped by the distance to the target if you're close enough). However if we go by this we should at least be able to get one hit on the target right after TS expires, although that attack would maybe feel "jerked" and not really effective. Maybe this explanation is the same as DavidW (I always think of David Warner when I read your name, hehe) gave but I must admit I didn't understand it entirely.

 

I must say this is a genuinely interesting discussion.

Very interesting. I will share a bit of my take on the matter (no pun intended).

 

If the caster can move around and have the bubble move with him, then that means that the bubble is plastic. If the bubble is around the caster you can bet that the caster can shape it to envelop the weapon as well. That means that the bubble is something plastic that can be extended and reshaped in space. This would be logical since you wave your hands around during casting so you are extending and reshaping the bubble. Even if your foe is frozen, if you can thus shape the space around you to extend your bubble so you can make the space in your target (your foe) be part of your bubble and presto, you have inflicted a wound.

 

The question here is: are you only able to reshape your bubble in air and not through solid matter? Because in this case I will agree that piercing foes is not an option whereas spellcasting would be.

Another question here would be: how plastic/reshapable is the bubble? If the caster can move around a large distance I stick with my earlier observation that the bubble is plastic and reshapable thus piercing flesh should be well possible. If not, then the caster must be frozen in a relatively small location during time stop, can only cast spells and physical damage should indeed be disabled.

What does peek my interest is that whereas spells are halted in space, so would arrows that are being shot from a bow. So if you shoot 10 arrows during a timestop, could they all fly towards your foe when the timestop is finalised? That does not happen in the game though....

 

I recall reading about the plane of time somewhere (probably Manual of the Planes 3.5) where one could travel back and forth in time.

I think that the current status of the time travel idea by some of the major scientists (Michio Kaku, Jeff Forshaw, Ronald Mallett, ... some others I cannot remember the name of off the top of my head) was that you can not travel further back in time than the point when the time machine was finalised and first started up because that would mean that you have broken the time-space continuum, or at least I recall that that was the theory behind it.

[Aion]

Sorry to break into the technobabble discussion over temporal mechanics (this sounds like a Star Trek Voyager episode!) but I have an announcement that is way overdue.

 

Some time back I issued Sikret a private ultimatum that if he didn't release IA v6 to the public, I would.

 

I am completely justified in doing this for a multitude of reasons, if nothing else because Sikret and der Fuhrer (Baronius) betrayed the ever-shrinking Improved Anvil community itself when it went behind the financial "Iron Curtain" of Baronius' latest money-stealing scheme. The proof is (amazingly) still visible on the tiny bit of BWL that's still free:

 

"All Infinity Engine game mods are completely free for all visitors" (found here)

 

as well as this one:

 

"Note: consequently, as all donations cover costs, this does not change on the fact that all Infinity Engine game mods will remain completely public and free." (located here.)

 

As you can see, Sikret and Baronius have lied to you. (Please....try to contain your horrified gasps of shock.)

 

Sikret even lied to me and other testers in his own group when we challenged him on this, saying that Improved Anvil v6 HAD to be released as a freely available mod because it had been promised in public. He insisted that no such promise had been made. (Apparently he has trouble locating those two free links above.)

 

Over the past few months, I've done a lot of online research about the history of Sikret's ongoing war with the remainder of the modding community. Initially, I was on his side, mostly because I liked his mod and was ignorant of all his sordid history in the community. As my eyes opened, though, I realized that in ALL of his interpersonal battles (and there's a LOT of them!) there's only one common factor: Sikret. When a guy manages to alienate not one, not a few, but ALL of his contemporaries, it's clear that he is the problem.

 

I had the "honor" of experiencing first-hand Sikret's full measure of condescending, arrogant elitism as one of his testers, and I refused to take it. I was very outspoken in criticizing him when it was due, which was quite a lot. I put him in his place many times and openly told him that he was being a jerk, alienating his own players and testers (not to mention the BG2 community). I was initially trying to help him to see that he needed to change, but he just doesn't get it. He really thinks he's right and literally everyone else is wrong. He honestly believes that he is a genius and all the rest of us are stupid. He openly states that he thinks that all of YOU (modders) are not as smart as he is, and that all of your work is inferior. It's disgusting. Finally I'd had enough when that worthless piece of sh*t Baronius was allowed to personally attack me within the Improved Anvil testing group, and Sikret not only didn't stop it, he supported it. (if anyone has any questions about the validity of this, I have transcripts of the posts.)

 

I have a beta copy of Improved Anvil v6. It's a version that is just short of the initial not-so-public release. I will send this to anyone that PM's me and asks for it. I will also try to answer any questions that anyone might have.

 

I warned Sikret to fulfill the promises linked above, and he completely ignored me. All I am doing is fulfilling those promises for him.

 

I do think you have a valid point in that the mods were promised to be free always, a promise that was broken. I agree that both Sikret and Baronius are arrogant elitists, and I have seen them slowly change over the course of 2008 while I was hosted there. I've seen how IA became BWL's flagship, and how Baronius basically changed his personality into someone less-than-pleasant. I'm glad I bailed out before all this crap happened.

 

All their behaviour is rediculous, the way they manage their site is rediculous, and we should all just boycot them. I strongly encourage everyone to never pay their fees, to stop visiting their website (except for mod downloads), and to just let them slowly rot, wither and die in their little private elite corner of the net. We all know BWL can't exist for very long now anyway, so why not speed up that process? Of course, if you need to vent here, then please do.

[berelinde]

Actually, I was rather enjoying the theoretical discussion on the physics of Time Stop.

[Shaitan]

Actually, I was rather enjoying the theoretical discussion on the physics of Time Stop.

Yup! I always find the notion of us being able to travel in time (in theory atleast) interesting.

[the bigg]

What does peek my interest is that whereas spells are halted in space, so would arrows that are being shot from a bow. So if you shoot 10 arrows during a timestop, could they all fly towards your foe when the timestop is finalised? That does not happen in the game though....

I don't know about MMMs or Energy Disks, but in my game Arrows are frozen in time and fly towards the foe once the TS finishes.

[lroumen]

you mean you wouldn't really want to do it if you were given the ability?

[Dakk]

"How I learned to stop worrying and love FAPP"

PS. Bigg, DavidW, Ardanis's discussion = <fap fap fap>

This

[DavidW]

Argh, I just have to argue.

 

if time is just what clocks measure, how can clocks run slow?

Clocks don't run slow, only slower than other clocks. I know you meant that but that's what I also had in mind when I wrote "time is just what clocks measure". Time is relative; what makes your "faster" clock better than mine? Nothing. Why do different experiments give different results of a real physical thing called time? Time is just what clocks measure. Time isn't "real", you can't possibly travel back in time, we just have a series of events that happen in particular order.

 

OK, here's a more detailed answer (those who want to get on with smacking BWL probably want to skip ahead): so this is actually a very-long-standing debate in the philosophy of physics, going right back to Newton. Newton and Leibniz clashed in the late 17th century over the nature of time: Leibniz claimed that "time" was just the order of events (roughly the view Nominar's defending), whereas Newton claimed that time was something that existed prior to events:

Absolute, true, and mathematical time, in and of itself and of its own nature, without reference to anything external, flows uniformly... (Scholium to Principia Mathematica, para. 1)

 

(They had a parallel disagreement as to whether space was merely the order of arrangement of objects, or whether it was prior to them). The reason for Newton's view was partly philosophical, but in large part came down to the fact that he couldn't frame his mathematics without a background of absolute time to define the equations. It turned out much later, though (it wasn't totally clear till the 1980s) that it was possible to reformulate Newtonian physics so as to recover the "order of events" picture, though even in this formulation it's not quite true that "time is what clocks measure", it's more that the arrangements of events, in toto, pick out a particular preferred way of defining time. Effectively, you use the whole Universe as a clock. This was actually the method used to define time by astronomers (they used the Solar system, not the Universe as a whole) until atomic clocks came on-stream after WW2).

 

Relativity theory changes the picture rather dramatically, and not the way you'd think - it doesn't actually make things more relative, it actually requires us to take seriously space and time as real, evolving things that change as a consequence of how matter moves. (In a slogan, "space tells matter how to move, matter tells space how to curve"). People have tried to apply the Leibnizian ideas to general relativity, but in my view it hasn't been wholly successful (this brings us up to contemporary physics).

 

Julian Barbour's book, The End of Time, is a lovely clear (and non-technical) introduction to these issues; his paper Absolute and Relational Concepts of Space and Time (http://www.platonia.com/papers.html) is also good.

 

(I work in this area professionally, if that's not obvious, though philosophy of spacetime isn't my primary research interest. And yes, this bit is serious, unlike my "chronomorphic field" pseudoscience post.)

[Nominar]

Great answer and an highly interesting topic, but I'm not the one to argue with a professional. I still stand by the statement that time travel (backwards) is impossible, at least in the classical storytelling sense without any parallel universes. I don't think there are many who'll dispute that though.

 

We'll probably be extinct in 100 thousand years and without ever having had a firm grasp on the concept of time. Yes, I'm cynical. In a 100 billion years there will be no more observable galaxies nor any effects of the Cosmic Microwave Background, quite depressing. But I digress.

[Ardanis]

What does peek my interest is that whereas spells are halted in space, so would arrows that are being shot from a bow. So if you shoot 10 arrows during a timestop, could they all fly towards your foe when the timestop is finalised? That does not happen in the game though....

I don't know about MMMs or Energy Disks, but in my game Arrows are frozen in time and fly towards the foe once the TS finishes.

You must have never seen a lich to cast TS and then MMM someone. Rather nasty, can it be

sometimes.

 

Great answer and an highly interesting topic, but I'm not the one to argue with a professional. I still stand by the statement that time travel (backwards) is impossible, at least in the classical storytelling sense without any parallel universes. I don't think there are many who'll dispute that though.

Hundred years ago nobody thought of AI-controlled spaceships or nuclear sources of energy, and now they're all real. Thousand years ago people thought Earth was flat. Etc. I wouldn't be surprised in the least if there're yet tons of undiscovered physical laws in existance, some of which may allow backward time travelling.

 

PS How comes my post is always the first on new page?