Messages

[move through the world]

I'm really trying to utilize all the variety of contacts in the city, but it's sucks hard when they send you on stupid introduction missions and they're at the bleeding ass end of the map.

Most of the zones in Paragon City were crafted pre-2004.
Most of the zones in the Rogue Isles were crafted pre-2007.

For reference, the first iPhones went on sale at the end of July, 2007 ... kicking off the cell phone/pocket computer internet terminal world that we live in today. Before the iPhone, it was quite common for people to NOT HAVE portable phones (let alone ones with computer-like features).

So all of the breadcrumb missions and introductions to new contacts were done in an era that was before the portable telecommunications+internet world that we've come to take for granted that has been built out since then. That's why so much of the legacy content feels like a throwback to an earlier era ... because it is.

Originally, you didn't get cell phone access to contacts until reaching the 3rd stage of their reputation meters. Once the iPhone revolutionized portable communications, the Devs revised that parameter such that contacts would give you their phone numbers upon reaching the 2nd stage of their reputation meters that you can see in the contact window listing them all.

Additionally, you couldn't take any Pool powers (at all) until Level 6 ... and Travel Powers (Fly, Superleap, Superspeed, Teleport) were unavailable until Level 14 (when almost EVERYONE took their first travel power!).

There were even 2 separate tram lines at the PTA (green and yellow) and they didn't link up to one another, so if you needed to switch tram lines you either had to run N/S through Steel Canyon or Skyway City in order to reach the "other" tram line.

The design intention was to make PCs move through the world, block by city block, zone by zone, in order to impart a sense of Size and Scale to the environment. The longer it takes a character to travel through the world, the "bigger" the world is (go figure...).

When you can just click a button and "skip" the world COMPLETELY to reach your destination ... the world becomes VERY VERY SMALL.

Kind of like how AE Babies™ who level from 1-50 at AE in Atlas can believe that there are no other zones besides Atlas, because they've never needed to leave Atlas at all before "beating the game" by getting to Level 50 in 1 day. They "didn't go anywhere" to the game world is "tiny" for them.



What you're suggesting with a TP to Contact power is to enable and reward the mentality that Instant Gratification Isn't Fast Enough. That's because the less you need to "travel" in game, the "smaller" the world you experience while playing the game becomes (see: never leave the AE building because there's nowhere else you need to go).

You're basically devaluing immersion in favor of convenience so as to satisfy impatience.
To put it politely, that's a Bad Deal™ for the overall health of an online game that wants to foster a sense of community and camaraderie. Skipping past the intervening distance via direct teleport to destination also means never having any chance encounters along the way ... which happens a lot more often as a server increases in population (because there's more people playing concurrently). There's no navigation knowledge/skill required, you just click a power and BAMPF! ... you're there.

That kind of fast travel tends to undermine the "health" of a server's community in a lot subtle and incremental ways, partly by leaving so much of its available territory VACANT most of the time, engendering a feeling of contempt for any space you have to actually travel through (not to mention the hassles of doing so). You then promote a feeling of entitlement in your Players, such that they shouldn't HAVE TO move through the game world at all ... at which point immersion collapses and you might as well be just staying in the lobby of AE all the time, never leaving the building (let alone the zone).

hmm, perhaps a 120 minute recharge is not enough. mission transporter is 120 minutes because it's roughly double the average mission complete time at mid levels. but TP to contact is only ever needed once or twice an arc. some arcs take a good week at casual playspeeds. perhaps the TP to contact power should be much rarer and have a whole week long recharge.

max 2 uses
a rare [orange con] temp power recipe drop.
168 hour recharge (with enough haste and playtime while hasted, you could bring it down to 72 hours or 3 days recharge time, allowing 2 uses per week)
recipe drops at level 35+
craftable at any level.
npc shop value: 400,000 inf

or do it like the mission auto-complete: 2 per week max "this power is available twice per week" that way it's available for TFs/SFs, but I still think it should be a rare recipe.


Why do I stick with the recipe idea? because it'll force players to leave atlas and at least go to a uni somewhere and learn crafting. no one can craft it for you. we should also give it some fairly hard to find salvage which potentially runs out from time to time. I remember back a few years ago some low level arcane salvage was always sold out due to how common it was for other things. this forced me to sit around taking down CoT to get runebound armor. "and that one mission in the midnighter arc said all their gear TPs away shortly after they are defeated. pff! they still drop stuff like everyone else"

why 400k inf in npc shops for it? it's 4 times as valuable as white con recipes at Lv 50, this is to make it even rarer to find it's way on the market, as people are liklier to sell it to shop. that or the listing price on WW will be millions each.

Rare will require one or 2 rare salvage to craft, meaning 2 to 8 million to buy the salvage. this is to make it not cheap.

so these are Ideas. it's nice to have to use once in a while, but shouldn't be a crutch..

OK decided to do some work on this, Redlynne suggested I add a hash feature so that I could eventually add build details directly into the URL. I thought it was a good idea so after some testing the following javascript will be used:

window.location.href

this gets the current page URL, I double checked that it grabs the changed URL as well with a simple console.log(window.location.href) before and after the hash statement.

next is

location.hash = "whatever you want to put after the URL"

from here I can work with the information, so if I wanted to list out everything in a hero/villain build as text I could do so. it's as simple as .split()ting the string like .split("#")[1].

that information was fairly easy to figure out.  However I'm not at the point where I can even construct much of a build doc at this point. I could potentially do so upto archetype>primary powerset>chosen primary powers, secondary powerset>chosen secondary powers. but I still have yet to finish the master dictionary of power values, and haven't even gotten to enhancements yet.

When the whole web mids thing is functional, I would need to figure out the data format used for mids forum posts and use that system for making the URL hash.

Originally I planned to have the user able to store the information in a cookie and output/readfrom a txt file in a specified folder. but I haven't even gotten to that yet.

anyways at least the hashing will be possible.

the original paragon devs were adverse to this idea, they feared that it'd essentially have players ignore large swaths of the game, miss events and exploration badges and clique into groups of players who don't know anything about the gameworld and essentially treat atlas park as a queueing zone for outside content, then having these same players complain and leave online reviews saying how much the game lacks content compared to their favourite MOBA.

in the end we did get [Mission Transporter] temporary power which is the hypothetical inverse of what you suggest, but it came with a long recharge.

I can see a similar thing being done here, and not limited to the first mission. remember some missions cannot be handed in by cell, "you should talk to this contact in person" such as when handing in items or discussing sensitive info.

However, there is "The Contact finder" and you can usually TP-to-contact through that, but it doesn't include all contacts especially some legacy contacts are excluded.

but for other contacts I could see a 120 minute recharge temp power [TP to contact] which will complete when you have a set mission (red icon in navigation) or a mission that was recently set and completed and has yet to be handed in.

it needs to be a set mission otherwise the game wont be able to determine which mission's contact you need to go to, and would fail.

zones/areas with TP suppression will need to cause it to fail.

It'll also need to fail if your contact is not in a place you can reach due to alignment or other conditions. that way you can't be a hero, complete a L20 hero contact mission, turn off XP and switch to villain and select a completed hero contact mission and TP to contact. Other conditions would be where the contact is dead/in-jail/kidnapped or a cellphone-only-contact.

rather than just granting everyone a permanent temp power, I suggest having them drop as recipies, craftable temp powers with +1 use per craft upto like 30 uses. tradeable/sellable. maybe common or uncommon, and available in places like AE for like 120 tickets, or at merit vendors for like 2 merits.

had a few dream over the past few days. some very vivid and lucid ones.. they were beyond my brain's ability to construct. let me explain that, so, the best example I can give is peripheral vision, in real life we cannot see things clearly if they are outside of our eyes' lense focus, we can still see them, but not clearly. well, the human brain also has limits which are comparable when it comes to constructing dreamscapes, if you look at something that was out of focus it usually morphs into something that you subconsciously think it is or will be, and if you look away and look back your brain must reconstruct the object and you may observe differences. this is as true for areas and places as well as for individual objects.

recently I had a 3 segment dream that broke this rule. not only was it like I was physically there, but I expected objects around me to lack clarity and stability of form, but instead they had clarity and stability of form, I could look away and look back at what was a cafe/store the things on the shelves were clear and unchanging. not only that, at the time I did not understand I was in a dream, because I had seen that place before, and recollected "ah, I've seen this place before in one of my dreams"

the entire dream was one of the long ones it occurred in 3 parts with me waking up inbetween them and then falling back asleep.


the last dream of that night had me in a house, it was dark but I could see in the grey light, I was not seeing things for what they were, things looked dangerous but they were not. I eventually was able to break out of that mental state and see things for what they were albeit still in the dream. then I tried to grab my cellphone in reality to take pictures of the place in an attempt to see if they would record the dream or reality.

however, when I actually awoke later, I had not grabbed my cellphone at all, and there were no new pictures on it. It felt so real and sounded and looked so real, I genuinely thought I had actually picked up my phone in reality and taken the pictures. to be fair in that dream, I had not exited the dream state into the dream+reality state, but it felt like I had.


yesterday I had a strange one, it heralded the fall of google(which has not yet happened), as in the company went bankrupt due to bad management because they spent too much to afford them to focus on things which didn't bring in any revenue. I had mixed feelings because would all the proprietization of the internet be reverted or undone now that google was gone? or would it just leave all the internet software in a mess that we'd have to fix peice by peice?


thinking about this, another vivid and lucid dream I had is brought to mind, I was living in this place day by day, I shared a 2 storey residence in a very tall residence tower, each floor had 2 floors and was 2 floors tall. multiple other people lived there and I recognised them, they have been recurring characters in my dreams for years, but I don't know any such people here in real life. in my dream  there was civilization, tall mostly glass-sided buildings stood on top of a grid made not of streets but walking paths made of brickwork which lined the streets. but outside of that it was all trees and lakes overgrown with vegetation.

I  was escorted in a building which had nicely decorated marble floors in it's foyer, we took the stairs up, then an elevator, there were offices on the lower levels, all the upper levels were greenhouses each floor with it's own specific climate to grow mass produced plants and other things for food. even the stairwells had things growing around them, and my job was to pick them. I was not alone in this job. after picking them the other person asked what I was doing, I thought we had been picking some sort of strange beans I had never seen before, she laughed and said they weren't beans, to be honest they didn't look like beans they looked more like a red flower pistol growing on a curved vine, but they the pistol was made of smooth hard bean-like seeds.

she took me to another floor which had a restaurant, for which the food was being grown. after turning in what we collected all the workers got to sit down and eat. there were waiters bustling about. the tables had a side counter for plates and such and a central raised platform for a grill of sorts, it was flat smooth and shiny. essentially the waiters prepared food onto plates to be put on the grill. I ate alot, it was tastey. I even had to turn down some shrimp they put on because I was too full. after that we went home. I felt perhaps I couldn't afford to eat at such a place, but apparently that's just how people lived, they lived in these isolated towns made of tall towers made for various purposes, there'd be 1 residence tower, one food production and dining tower, and a few small shopping and manufacturing towers, people worked where they wanted to when they needed to and essentially worked as part of a team to make what they needed.

when I got home, I went through the livingroom of our residence, and went up stairs to a hall where my room was to put things away and take off my jacket and such for the day. when I came back down, multiple people were on the sofas and some were in a small kitchen off to the side, which was primarily used for storing simple breakfast supplies and leftovers. no one cooked at home. the view was nice as there were large windows looking outside, I could see the micro-city and some of the surrounding wilderness. we got to talking and I mentioned that I wasn't from there originally and casually reminisced about "back in 2024", and they said the year was 3994 giving me odd looks. this kinda took me aback after I woke up, I mean, did I really see a year far in the future that I couldn't hope to live to in my wildest dreams?

thinking about it further, this would explain some other issues in prior dreams, the planet being earth, but having differences, cities that do not exist at present, extra continents. then again no matter how real they seem they may just be dreams. I don't know what year "the fall of google" dream took place as I did not ask. I guess it's something to look into, if these dreams were taking place far in the future, there might be records of events in history that I could use as tests against past present and future to determine validity or lack thereof.

speaking of events: google failing, it was a big deal and in the news everyone was talking about it, I was told to get anything I had stored in gmail or any google drive off of it while I still could (I don't have anything stored there and don't use googlemail). I was also told some googled devices like cellphones running android and some google software might stop working entirely because of failed updates and failed communication with their mother-sever triggering a built-in brick which will disable them if they have not been updated in some amount of time. there were a lot of angry people, even google employees got angry and started several angry groups because they were denied their last paychecks or something like that. they were angry, but not militant(at that time) but some had fairly militant rhetoric which alleged discrimination because some high ranking google executives and teams got final paychecks but others of certain groups which could be quantified under a common factor did not receive paychecks and were told they would not be getting them as part of the bankruptcy settlement did not allow for sufficient funds. I somehow doubt that was in 3994. it seems like that could happen much sooner.

Well, I don't know City of heroes' cone system, so someone may have a brighter answer, but I do know general game design cones;

To accomplish a Cone in game development, you literally make a 3D End-Capped Cone mesh object and use it's polyheader shape as either a sensor (to detect enemies touching it(or inside it, which is why an end-cap is used), OR you set it up as a ghost actor with some property that enemies check for; and have enemies running their own hitrolls and appling damage to themselves based on the power cast and it's values.

so now you're talking Geometry to define the arc/angle of the cone. normally in a game changes to this are done by a simple scaling operation. but a cone fired forwards is essentially a rounded 3D triangle from a top view, no matter how you scale it it's still a triangle, if you scale it negative on the local forwards axis it wont have any forward geometry, it will just be a cone that fires backwards. if you scale it perpendicular to the forwards axis, it will become a wider cone, however there'd be at least a 45 degree gap to the sides of the cone but if you tried to bring the end cap of that cone closer to the player (by scaling on the local forwards axis) to get rid of that 45 degree gap or lessen it, then you're subtracting from forwards range,  and if you scale it to 0 on the local forwards axis, then a cone becomes a 2D circle (or halo) it has no forwards nor backwards geometry, just geometry to the sides and top and bottom.

Now some cones in game may fire from just behind the player to catch some enemies standing next to them in the cone collision bounds, providing a bit more safety for ranged users. (if it fired from their hand then enemies not in front of their hand would never be effected)

But if you want a scalable AoE, you'd plop in an 8 ring 8 segment UV sphere set to ghost, as the cone object centered on the player, then you can scale the sphere rather than a cone, anything that goes into the interior of the sphere (or touches it) will be detected by the sphere as colliding with it.

even in CoH not all AoE have the same size, Electrical_Melee.Thunder_Strike has a much smaller sphere than Electrical_Melee.Lightning_Rod.

Also if you want to save polygons and dont care about it being a true sphere, you can just use an endcapped cylinder top to bottom on the global up and down axis at a scale of the desired AoE. but because this game has fliers that's not suggested; as the 3D corner hypotenuse( center of cylinder to edge of endcap) would be much longer than the AoE radius. then you'd get complaints "that AoE only has a range of 16!, but I'm at 20 up in the air at 45 degrees from it and it's hitting me!"

However some AoE are best done as cylinders; Water_Control.Geyser_Burst and Electrical_Melee.Lightning_Rod in example.

Not all AoE are 3D, some AoE Fields are flat circles on the ground. you literally have to step on them not fly over them to be effected.

been having some rough ones lately, mostly showing me the negative aspects of my character, and some warnings about things.

last night in a dream a fleshy screen appeared out of my body. it read 260 something, and it was explained to me, that thats the amount of "lives" I have left. as if I'm a video game character. still 260 isn't a bad number of lives to work with, so long as I don't get stuck with some sort of final boss that takes some special hidden technique to defeat (gaming joke).

at my current rate of use of my lives, Idk.. do I count deaths in dreams or deaths in reality or both? I guess both. I don't have a perfect count of times I've died in dreams since I was born, but recently maybe 2 or 3 this year?. and my iRL deathrate has been holding pretty steady since 2016 at 1.. so if things continue as they are maybe 1 irl death every 30 years and 2 to 3 dream deaths a year, 61 to 91 every 30 years... so 260/61= 4.26229508196..* 30=127.8688524590, and 260/91= 2.85714.. *30=85.714285... so I could live to like anywhere between 115 to 157, but that's just rough probability, considering nothing terrible happens in that given time which would change the deathrate. 115 years isn't bad for a flesh clock.

I mean it's fair game, I came into this world knowing I wouldn't have infinite goes at it. in fact I've been told you only get 1 life in this game. that estimate was a bit unreliable in my experience so far. but, 260?! I'll just not tempt fate lol, it was just a dream.

the doors should not be moved. each door at current loads a specific potential set of maps, all doors do not load all maps. swapping doors would be a bit of an issue, as from what I understand they are like pseudo npcs being loaded at a specific location after the map loads and having a dynamic name (number) which designates what mission maps they lead to in code.. this means other potential missions which use the same door would also be moved.

instead, I suggest something like in atlas park in the warehouse district where 2 content sources are used in that area, one for during a mission, and one set of enemies for other situations.

The conditions would of course be different. I say let it be based on level and contact availability. :

at early levels 0 to 10 new villain characters enter at the fortress with the contacts there and everything secure like in the old days. and the entire area stays like that for them until they level to like 11 and/OR have no more interactions with those contacts at which point leaving the area could play a longbow invasion event where longbow spawns capture the area, and then that's permanent.

[/reloadgfx]

/reloadgfx

Probably the closest thing to what you're talking about.

thanks for the info, just tried during a blackscreen event, it seemed to reload the scene because the sounds suddenly stopped and their directions (stereo sound) changed but it did not redraw the graphics.

I think all graphics languages have a redraw command for window content, I know C and GL does.

/ReDraw

/ReDraw should take One optional argument ("Window", "3DWorld", "Both") default being "3DWorld", all it does is redraw the window and 3D environment.

This is to handle issues on some graphics cards where switching resolutions or switching between windowed and fullscreen, or switching between windows causes an Undrawn black screen in the 3D world (Mouse icons, sounds and the game itself are unaffected (you could literally play blind with a black screen), but this is to fix that.

affixing this to a macro/hotkey would be great.

Does such a slashcommand already exist?

Wow! great work! and good info. I'll go through this at some point.

Among mosquitos, it's the females that are the blood suckers (they need it to supplement their energy reserves). Males do not drink blood.

So speculating that could have been a male mosquito ...?

aren't the males supposed to be larger than the females and be often confused with mayflies? this thing was normal mosquito sized, and given it was attacking the cat to follow it into the house, I'd say it'd be a female.

So, I was eating dinner tonight (here in reality(joke about my other thread)) and before dinner I let our cat back in the house anda  mosquito followed him in, then disappeared into the shadows like they do.

then as we were sat down at dinner (we had indian curry), I noticed something was fliying around hovering over my food. as I took a closer look, it was definitely a mosquito, not any of the look-a-likes an actual mosquito. I shooed it away and tried to clap it between my hands and told people at the table it was a mosquito. then it disappeared off somewhere, and I figured I had better finish eating quickly.

My dad got up mid meal to get more tea, and then I noticed the mosquito had come back and was now hovering over his plate rigth over some mango chutney he had smeared on the rim of his plate. and it landed on the mango chutney and started drinking it.

I told my dad when he came back and sat down and after a minute he saw it. the mosquito was not going to leave on account of him until he tried to get it with a napkin. then it flew away.

Needless to say I got a good view of it on it's escape path and killed it so that it wont fly in anyone's bedroom and potentially bite us while we sleep, and yes it was an actual mosquito. but I have never heard of mosquitoes eating chutney before, or really anything other than blood. Was this a new breed of mosquito that goes after sugar instead of blood? maybe I shouldn't have killed it, maybe if left alone it would have passed on DNA to make other mosquitoes prefer sweets to blood?

Perhaps this is a real thing that could actually be done, perhaps we could train mosquitoes in a lab setting enmass to eat sugary substances instead of blood and embed it in their DNA. then release them into nature and have them replace the blood sucking pests? imagine a world where mosquitoes prefer berries and fruits to humans.

[Warning, there may be some religious contexts in here, read at your own discretion Or not.]

So, some here that know me may know that for a while I kinda had some issues dealing with my dreams.

Let me explain, when I sleep theres a 99%+ chance my dreams will be vivid and lucid in every capacity. that means in my dreams I can taste, smell, hear, feel and see everything as if it were real. not only that things had been getting pretty freaky where characters in my dreams can respond to me in ways that I have no idea what they would say, but they tell me things; names of places and responses to questions I didn't expect.

So, I started to wonder, when I sleep am I actually going places? I ruled out sleep-walking. because there is no city called Co-kasar and earth has around 7 or 8 continents depending on various viewpoints by various real world parties, but I've never heard someonein reality say we had 12 continents. In dreams I have heard people tell me we had 12 continents, thats a bit of a stretch for people to say about our planet. the people in that dream didn't know what a country, state/province was either.

and if I was going places, well.. then.. what I do in my dreams actually could be effecting people somewhere. So.. filling my head with images of violence (playing a superhero game where we use a variety of super lethal methods of taking down enemies in example, or violent behavior in anime etc.) could effect what happens in my dreams before I'm fully conscious there.. I know that sounds strange "being conscious in a dream".

So I was pretty distraught, kinda blew my top with lots of very negative excuses in PvP, before realizing what was really bothering me.


Well, I mostly have that under control. mostly.. my dreams are still super vivid and lucid, if anything they've gotten more vivid and more lucid.

For the dreams I am able to remember when I wake up, on days I'm not disturbed before the memory is fully written, I plan to describe the stranger things I've encountered here in this thread related to my dream time.. I do not plan to divulge full descriptions of entire dreams unless absolutely necessary for context (so there will be some full dream logs here).


Warning, there may be some religious contexts in here, read at your own discretion Or not.



Let me start with some very strange occurrences I had.

so, there's a state of mind between sleeping and being awake. this has been the basis of fairytales, such as neverland, which according to the fairytale exists "inbetwween dream and reality". So yes there is actually such a state of mind. Some people get stuck in this state, it can lead to whats called "sleep paralysis" where you wake up and cannot move no matter how you try.

I have encountered sleep paralysis multiple times. people hear strange things when in this state. and after experiencing it many times I can say why, when you are in that state for some reason your brain makes your sense of hearing Super Powered. you can hear minute details of sounds that normally you could not hear. I think this is actually a defense mechanism of the body to allow a sleeping person to hear potential dangers to a exponentially greater effect than when awake because you are practically denied of every other real world sense.

However, things got even stranger.

Multiple times I have woken up and could still hear the people in my dreams talking to me. only for a few seconds. like half a minute tops, usually. and yes I knew they were dream characters so I'm not lacking the ability to disassociate real things from dream things. I don't hear voices at any other time, just in this waking gap. Normally this state of mind only lasts a split second, but for me it can last for minutes sometimes.

Q: can you talk to the dream characters and get responses in this state?
A: Yes. - this makes it super strange. almost ethereal.

now for a long time that has been the limit. and it fades as I become more conscious/aware here in the real world. However things have gotten even stranger.

One time (during a summer holiday in a rented house) I woke up and had my right hand behind me where the edge of the bed should be while sleeping on my side (for bloodflow reasons), and I had this strange sensation in my hand; I was touching skin. and I thought for a moment "is it really skin? or is it just my brain tricking me and really it's the sheets?" so I gavee it a good light grab, then rubbed it, and yep, it was still the texture of skin and had the shape of a thigh. so my next investigation was to rub it and pay attention to if I felt anything on my own body (because that would indicate I had my arm at some odd angle and was actually touching my own thigh) so I rubbed it some more. and no. I did not feel anything rubbing any part of me.

At that point I got a bit spooked and did not want to turn around. so I decided to use my hand to detect if indeed this was a thigh and not the edge of a pillow or bed etc. by shape, you know, if it's a thigh it should be connected to things in a structure that the edge of a pillow or bed will not be. so I went further and found the thigh was indeed connected to hips, adn the hips connected to a waist, and the wasit connected to a chest, and a chest connected to shoulders and arms, and a neck and head. I gave it a little back of neck massage with one hand so as to act innocent and then put my hand back to myself and turned around and no one was there.

sounds like a ghost story huh?

so, in that state of being inbetween dream and reality yet fully aware of real world surroundings, I could not just hear people from my dreams speak, but actually touch them as if they had real-world tangible volume and texture.

but then when I got back from vacation something I'd never had happen in a long time happened.

(in a full dream state): I was in a dream, I ended the dream by going to my bedroom and laying down in my real world bed to go to sleep. but I had left the door to my room open. and outside my room, rather than the hallway in my IRL house, was the kitchen of the mess-hall of a factory from my dream.

then I woke up IRL
(now awake in reality): the hallway was still the kitchen for the messhall of the factory. my door was still open. and lo and behold the lady that was helping me in the kitchen comes to my doorway and says "would you like me to close your door?" and I said "no, leave it open please", and she said "alright" and she left to go back to the kitchen. and then I just stared at the doorway while sitting up and watched as the open door faded away and a closed door replaced it. - great so now in that mental state between dream and reality I can still see things and hear things that are happening in my dream as if overlayed over reality.



it's not all pleasant though. I began to be concerned about what would happen if I died in my dreams. and even more concerned about what happens to dream characters. (a bit loopy for sure) but didn't let it effect reality other than feeling bad for dreamworld characters in certain situations.


Then sometime later, I had a nightmare, and in the dream near the end,

(fully in dream): context, I was assigned to be part of a 3 man team of monster hunters, it was super strange because we had the ability to pull up a hud display over the top of the dream like a banner and grab equipment from the hud to use in the dream. we were sent to get rid of strange dragon like creatures whose bodies had thick plates of what I'd say was pure white rock in rounded but square plates (lookign somewhat like an armadillo, but with solid black between the plates and the plates protruded from their bodies in a square fashion. at first all was well, I took out 3 weapons, one of which could suck up the monsters like a vaccuum, and another was a pair of lightsaber like things. and so I dove down into the monster nest and a big one materialized out of ash, and I used the vaccum thing to suck some of it up, but the tank got full, so we retreated. my allies went deeper in looking for places to hide while I flew out and distracted the large monster and got away from it by getting between a broken roof and floor ont he side of the area. but there were more of the monsters on that level of the building, small ones and they backed me into a corner. so I grabbed the lightsaber things I had put in my back pocket and began fighting, they were super effective, until they ran out of power and disappeared leaving me defenseless and cornered lol.

then they bit me. and OW!!!! that hurt!!! it hurt so bad I woke up.

(fully awake state in reality): but the pain was still there.. I could feel their bite marks. as if they were down to the bone. (and for the rest of the day the pain would flare up here and there) but there was no actual damage that I could see. but despite the pain, I somehow got back into the same dream while awake and in pain.

(back into the dream), I got to my feet, threw the monsters off me and ran back to HQ to get help. I made it. and in HQ I asked some people for help and they agreed and said "this is gonna cost you, you know" and so I was like "yeah, I'll owe you one." and we went back to go take care of the monsters together. when we got there, my partners who had stayed behind used my distraction to get the jump on the monsters so there was nothing much to do. but in pretense I emptied my vaccum thing at headquarters into a containment mechanism just to be sure, when I got there they told me they took care of it. but there was one tiny monster sleeping on top of a mailbox. so I used the vaccuum to suck it up because we wouldn't want it to wake up again.

They fed me.I had pancakes and sausage and eggs.

When I woke up again,

(fully awake again) the pain from the bites was still there. pulsating here and there. but I was very full.

This is not the first time I had such strange things happen with Food. I have been fed in dreams before and woke up full and not hungry for like 3 or 4 hours. in the dream of Co-kasar (city name) they fed me sandwiches, and a cup full of brown sugar, that dream was Very Long. I woke up not hungry didn't need breakfast that day.

Then there's the thiong that happens when you eat, you know, after a while everyone has to do it. I've done that in dreams. #1 and #2. (now.. you know when we were babies if we did that in a dream, we'd for sure mess ourselves in reality), but in reality there was no mess.. and I was empty. I did not have to use the restroom that day.


Now lets talk about Very Long dreams and what I mean by Very Long. I mean there was a string of events that was for a period of 48 hours. you know, 2 full days. I slept in the dream, I ate int he dream I lived and worked in the dream and slept again got fully rested and woke up again and you get the idea. and it was definitely full rested sleep, I even dreamed in the dream.

but get this, that day before this happened I actually had had trouble sleeping, I ened up going to sleep at like 7 AM and waking up at 11 AM. only 4 Hours. but I was gone for 48 in the dream filled with 48 hours worth of events. but I returned well rested.


over time I just kinda accepted that my dreams cannot be fully understood by me. and that I should just be careful and caring to everyone in my dreams.

but being a pascifist ended up getting me beheaded. that was a shock. it hurt really bad. my head rolled to the ground, and a short while later I woke up. when i woke up (middle of the night), no matter how I relaxed myself I could not get back to sleep. the best way I can describe it was like I was Blocked "connection refused", "the phone number you have dialed is offline, please try again later".


this is not the only time I have died in dreams since then. the last time was a few nights ago, on the planet with 12 continents.

(there was a dream before this next segment that leads into it, I remember it but it's not relavant to the main dream that day outside of these brackets below, it was about me being led by this lady aroudn this kinda overgrown area with dirt paths between vegetation, she pointed out some stonework in the path and under the vegeetation and said "that used to be where the kitchen table was", then I saw a dog running around (which looked exactly like my old dog from when I was a kid) and found some intact houses, but then went calling for my old dog and went accross a small brook and on the shore of a pond  as the slope of the shore got slightly raised I fell down and passed out)

I ended up in a cafe, on the upper floor, I was trying to talk to people there to ascertain whether they knew anything about our world and find out more about theirs. I asked what state/province we were in they had no idea what states or provinces are, I asked what country we were in, they said "whats a country?", I asked how many continents they have on their world, they counted for a moment and said "twelve" and I said "thats alot more than back in my world, what's your world called?" they replied "Earth" and I said "Strange seems a very common name for planets then, mine is also called earth" I then said "in my world we have video game companies called Nintendo and Sony, Sega as well" they laughed and said the names sounded funny, especially Sony they got a kick out of it and I couldn't understand why. I told them about the NES, but I couldn't remember what the Sony systems were called. they were a bit shocked at this course of conversation and One of them decided to lead me out of that cafe to show me more of their world.

About this time I got that feeling, you know the one "you are about to wake up, because you knew this was a dream and are becoming too conscious." but then it was like the back of my brain clamped down on the dream and there was this energy flow like I've never experienced before. I had Complete control over how long I could stay in this dream, absolutely complete control, I could have lived there, everything became super vivid and super lucid (and thats saying something because normally my dreams are super vivid and lucid). so this was like Hyper level integration... it was like I felt I was disconnecting for my body here in our reality and establishing my presence there.

then they took me to an arcade, we played games then went to a cinema and watched a movie.

Mid movie I remember the name of the Playstation. so I told the one that was with me "I'm going back to the cafe I remembered the name of the other game system for Sony, the Playstation, I want to know if they've ever heard of it" they were like "Ok".

so I went back to the cafe, and the guy I wanted to see that I had been talking to previously was there, but he was smoking, inside the building. so I guess that isn't illegal there, I got a bit irked, but figured I should respect their laws. so I decided I would just go over quickly and tell him then walk away. I mean he was smoking something with a lot of smoke coming from it. but when I got close, gah... the smoke was so strong... it gave me that feeling of chemically burning my eyes and then I started to have trouble breathing and was coughing pretty bad. it was a chemical burn in my lungs. so I told him quickly "I remembered the sony system was called the playstation" and then passed out keeled over the table he was sitting at unable to breathe.

but the dream didn't end there, see, I was fully latched onto it, I had full control over starting and stopping the dream, so not even a reflex like choking or dieing would trigger me to wake up, I'd have to consciously stop the dream myself, but being passed out I could not do that.

So I ended up coming-to in this place.. it was a tall building arrayed with windows between white pillars. light shone in through the windows. and there were people sitting around on stone seats built into the walls. then some sort of administrator came and said "you can't be here, you don't have a towel" and pointed to everyone else and they all had these white towels on their shoulders. So I asked "where do I get a towel?" and he pointed down a hallway that went past changing rooms on every side.

I went through and on the other side was an archway that openned up to the sky, outside there was an orange sky like sunset, but darker and more deep in color, there were buildings to the right each one had these small abodes in them, just big enough for a bed and maybe some shelving, maybe a TV. some were bigger than others, but there were no doors on any, more like shower curtains. there were LOTS of them. all jam-packed together. multiple floors going way way up. the buildings were made of red brick and were very square. the buildings were arranged parallel to what I thought was a body of water like a lake but it was very hot when I would get near it to go to these houses. I asked the first person in the first one where I could get a towel, he pointed behind me and said "that guy is the only one handing out towels any more."

I looked back to where I had came from near the archway, and there was a table set-up next to it on it's right (from my perspective) up against the wall of the building. I went over and there was a tiny man as small as a baby with two short pointy horns and red skin and he was flying. and I said "I was sent here from in that building to get a towel", and he said "the judgement has already come down, you get one of these towels" and he handed me a thin almost threadbare blood red cloth, you know with unhemmed edges so it will fall appart. and I know that given we had just started this conversation, that theres no way, he contacted anyone to figure out any unique judgement to me, he had a table full of these red threadbare things, and I could tell he was just handing them out to everyone. so knowing this was the only place to get a towel, I put it on but was not pleased, I had a feeling this was a bad connotation. So I grabbed him by the collar knowing he was trying to trick me and said "I adjure you in the name of [spoiler]yahweha yeshu[/spoiler] to tell me only the truth" then his face looked very shocked and scared and he pointed at my shoulders and I looked down and the towel had turned pure white and was no longer threadbare it was thick, and well woven. so I released him, and said "listen, I don't actually mean to hurt you I just want to make sure you're giving me the correct information" and he just backed away and shrunk and when he got to a wall he went down into the gap between the square grey stone flooring and the red brick wall and shrunk until I couldnt see him.

Having no one to talk to, and realizing I had a towel as I was told to go get, and it was white like the people inside the archway building past the changing rooms, not red like the people in the small abodes. I took a look back and realized it wasn't water reflecting the orange sky, but the liquid was bubling and actually emiting orange light not reflecting it.. then I noticed there were fires.

Needless to say I decided "I got a white towel, I better not stick around and accidentally get lost while looking around here, I can see the gate after all(the archway, but there was no actual gate). I get the sense that not many people get a white towel these days, and probably not so fast as this.. I mean I practically walked in here and after two convos got it." So I went straight past the changing rooms. and people in the changing rooms were handing me clothes now, socks mostly, and other garments too. then I went back into the place where white light shone through the windows, found an empty seat and asked if It was ok to sit down. and they said "yes, it wont be long now though" and there was this other door the other side of the room from the hallway which led to the changing rooms, and I noticed that it had some sort of circular blue energy that almost rippled and was clear like water. then a white light came out of it and I woke up.

(now fully awake) back in reality I had a really bad heartbeat that morning, I get them sometimes(irregular heartbeats), it feel very stressful like I'm trying to pump glue through a thin tube and I had no energy, lots of stress chemicals...


so as far as I figure it. because I couldn't get out of the dream and died in the dream... (I mean it really shocked me when I finally woke up). I just wonder, did I die or was I inhabiting someone else and got them killed by someone's second-hand smoke? that bothers me a bit. but if it is just a dream.. still. I was so glad when my towel turned white in that dream.. lol.. I had been pretty worried and forlorn when I kinda put 2 and 2 together and realized that was at least a mental image of hell, and trickery of devils to condemn people... What I learned from that is, my towel turned white of NOTHING to do with me, that was not my doing. if it didn't happen.. I kinda shudder to think, this extrememly long 3 part dream, I wonder if I'd ever have woken up lol...


well.. it's that time again.. off to see what my dreams have in store for me tonight. will things get even weirder? will I ever get enough evidence to satisfy myself that these are just dreams? or will I have more strangities to share? will I come back at all? will I fall into a coma? will I actually die?

only one thing I've never been able to do with my dreams yet. and thats to bring something physical from the dream back to this reality. it does however make me wonder about that time with the open door into the dream world that I could see when I was awake.. what would have happened if I went through that door? could I even go through? or was it just an illusion?

I don't expect to be able to remember tonight's dream. because I have to get up early tomorrow. but, I've been surprised before.

___

I was able to remember last night's dream, it was still on the lucid and vivid side, they fed me some cake, it was tasty. they were running some sort of podcast and each of us spoke after we ate some cake, taking turns. it was definitely not on earth because we flew there in a spaceship, and I could see the lights of the cities on the dark side of the planet as we approached. other than that, there was little to no "inbetween dream and reality" event today. so not much to report.

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there's no Icon image url. same with all the thread images and the images next to Home, Search, Calendar and Members and here in the new topic field page next to Other Options. there's no images.

I had cloudflare other than this webpage blocked. the Icons show when I unblock it. but still. thats kinda strange that theres no image urls.

ok so, I've been working in blender and fine-tuning my skills. finding methods to do things that actually overcome some of the issues in the first post, so I felt I'd update.

it's still on-hold. blender has some limitations I did not know well enough to get around at the time. the major problems are:
1: dynamic text that doesn't abuse memory is kinda unstable. in blender 2.5 to 2.79 you can use a text object, but that renders the text from a vector curve, and seems to suck up processor and memory power. In 2.49b you use a .tga image font, the problem there being that when you transfer the game to a different machine all the text turns into '@'s , the fix is to go in and re-unwrap every single text field and lay it out on the @ in the image, which is not something most casual players will easily be able to do. theres another method which requires a bit more programming expertise and essentially costs 1 polygon per letter in some cases, it also requires an in game dictionary of words and phrases so as to cut down on polygons. it would be a ton of work. I studied text using the bitmap fonts and got it to transfer macghines by packing external files into the blend and the setting all paths relative by links that was the problem because the link is the textual location of the image file, so even if you pack the image, blender font engine is still looking for the bitmap ascii file at the original linked location which probably doesn't exist on another machine, so by making the links relative to where they are in the game engine now the text works on any machine.
also word wrap is something I need to program myself, as well as text window bounds, scrolling and such, it's likely it'll have to be some crazy videotexturemodule trick to make a chat box actually scroll and hide out of box text.
I made a basic wordwrap, but I can do better. the basic wordwrap wrapped based on the character width of a set number of fullwidth text characters "@" but for thinner characters it wraps each line short. so rather than setting a character limit per line I decided I'd have to figure out how much space each character occupies on width and make a dictionary of widths so wordwrap can be calculated by textbox width.
in the process of doing this a bug showed me that I wont need a video texture module trick to handle scrolling at all, instead I can just adjust which lines of text are displayed based on scroll percent.
oh and I made sliders. so scroll bars are a go. (I'm actually using them for a color picker window at current, but that needs to be broen down into smaller networks of game logic, separating red green and blue, because I hit some sort of bugged limit of how many logic bricks blender will actually show at one time, kinda bad when you select an object and look through it's logic bricks and say "I could have sworn it had a keyboard sensor, oh right it does, but it's not shown.. why? oh, I see too many objects linked together").
2: Dynamic shadows, blender only allows buffered shadows with a spot lamp. it also gets pretty pixelated over large distances. there's a gamelogic bricks function to make an object into a 2D n64 style shadow that follows the player around at ground level and hangs over edges floating in the air, and then theres theoretical raytraced shadows using a shadow scene and the render to texture module but it's not confirmed to work.
*Crazy Smile* my mad science works! WAHAHAHAH, so the green text is a go. I can render a shadow layer with copies of the models but in shadow color and use the video texture module to capture that camera's view (from each lamp) with an alpha transparent background and paste them onto a flat plane, then video texture render all those lamp reenders of shadow objects onto a single texture on the actual scenery. it has some limits but I've seen that lots of games hit the same limits.
Edit: I messed around with spot lamp buffered shadows, on my old computer they were always super pixelated and awful over large distances, not only that, the sourcecode that creates them does them in a different draw step over the top of the window, this used to cause buttons sliders and text boxes in the buttons window/editor to become graphically unresponsive (they still work, but the button slider or text graphic does not change while buffered shadows are active, so you couldn't see what you were doing), this is now not the case on this machine, I found ways to smooth the shadows over decently long distances, and they don't bother the buttons any more (must have been a RAM issue on my old computer.
3: Encryption. this was a real kicker. I think python has some form of data encryption module, but there doesn't seem to be a controlled method for key negotiation and exchange. I did make my own data encryption method the problem is building it lol.
still no progress here. I did reevaluate my message encryption system, it is valid. but I need to program a working example.
4: motion textures, blender can only do motion textures with the videotexture module, it uses essentially double the graphics memory and processor power as rendering the gamescreen then converts it to the desired image resolution. there's other methods I've stumbled upon more recently that should help essentially mesh swapping.
I practiced with motion textures, and finally got around to making some sphere-looping textures like fire. that was a challenge, but now I have a system for making sphere-looping generated textures. things like fire were a former issue for me in blender but now I can make looping fire without the frame-loop-reset flicker.
Edit; I've studied motion textures in blender, I know how to use image frames for animation now. I've been studying special effects recently I'm getting close to covering all the bases in game; Fire, water(ripples, splashes and player interaction), rain/snow, clouds, smoke, sparkles. I do need a better system for things like lightning or energies, some can be pseudo-particle effects, but many cannot and will need clever usage of geometry and animated textures.   
5: updates, patches etc. while there are methods to do this automatically, you essentially need to build the updater into the game, and as far as I know it has some critical limits. real-time mesh and image creation are essentially a pipe-dream in-game. they are meant to be done out of game.
images can be swapped with the video texture module, communicating these images to other players can be done as well ( I found that out when messing with images in TKinter windows, there's built-in methods to convert an image directly into a data form which can them be sent through a socket gram.
The .blend can be saved from active memory, but can only be reloaded from file ONCE while in-game. a second time crashes blender.
that one reload is enough to display a created mesh or any other modifications to the game, sounds are a bit more tricky. sound updates will have to be a "update complete, please close and reopen the game" situation.


I'm at the point where I could almost START to do this. emphasis on start, as it'd be a long haul of a job to put it together. due to IRL I will not have time for quite a while though.