Dungeon Master Forum

OMG Baldurs Gate. Outstanding. I used to play D&D in the late seventies. Graph paper and pencils. My high school had a D&D club after school. Anyhow,I played so many final fantasy games I got bunrt out.I gave up gaming. Then I realized something was missing. Playing RPGs teaches you something. It gave me the insperation to wake up and get out of bed. And when I would lay my head down to sleep, I think of what I need to do to advance in the game. Last thing I like to balance game playing. One RPG at a time. Driving game,mainly Gran Turismo.Shooting game,Ghost Recon. Get tired on one genre, play a different one. Sorry for ranting.

I have a similar sort of thing sometimes, where I look at all my game shortcuts but can't think which one I fancy playing right now. Or where I'll have already stared a game but for some reason keep procrastinating and doing other stuff instead of loading it up, even though I enjoy playing the game. I have no idea why this happens though, lol. It's almost like I sometimes have to make myself double-click the icon and load the game up, because once I'm playing it I get into it and it's fine. Weird.

@money: You've probably either grown up, are too busy on other things, or have a different focus these days. Our priorities in life can change drastically, and things like games that we once enjoyed can become pointless time-sinks that we no longer have time for.

I've found in the last couple of years that I simply don't have the inclination to play games the way I used to. I bought lots of things on Steam but have never got around to playing them. And I'm now developing a new web business and trying to write a gamebook and gamebook-app, so my focus is elsewhere. I no longer have the time to play new games. Every now and then I do play something, but it's few and far between these days. I'd rather be creating than consuming.

Your interest in games might change over the years. That's normal and I wouldn't worry about it.

Very interesting.
Me too, I have up and downs about games. Can stay long, out of it and now and then, dive into some franzical addiction.

I keep forgetting that there are ppl way more smarter than me. I showed the post by Money to my son ,he did not understand. I realize ya'll crazy good wit computers. My son strives to be like you guys. He is 16 now,all he ever does is play pc games. W e homeschool him. He does not even like going out the front door. Is this the wave of the future? I kinda do not blame him. He has not discovered females yet. Praise Jesus.

Hi Ameena. Gurl set me up with some drinkers and lasses when I visit England. Por favor. Nes pas.

@money, lack of game drive
Yep. I have gaming burn-out at the moment but don't have much time to play games anyway (like yourself)... I have resorted to:

• read a book
• get certification in the task that I have done at work over the last five years. A big effort on my part!
• play more with my kids. Board games or.... Worms.
• still resort to playing FTL though! It's great to jump in and then jump out for brief or not-so-brief sessions

I don't consider this to be a 'problem', btw. I DO miss thinking about constructing a dungeon, however.

Hey money, good to see you back around!


I think Gambit's partially right with the age thing. But I also think that these days us people who remember simply grinding a single game or awaiting a single tv show to roll around / film to come on TV, etc just now have so many outlets. It's choice paralysis really.

I have a huge amount of tv shows and films and books and indeed games sitting around ready to be consumed. And while some are 'you need to be in the mood' type affairs, some are proven quantities that I want to get to but just myself unable to commit to. I think it does stem from some subconscious feeling that there are other things you could be doing - worse at our ages, where there are perhaps thing we feel we should be doing instead of leisure too. So there's a thought of if you should be relaxing wiht something, and even when you get to that hurdle, a reluctance to commit tthat time in any one direction.

Tricky to balance it all!

So yeah, I find that too, and also tend to find that when I finally go commit to something I burn through it or enjoy it and can't work out why I didn't get back to it sooner. Then so it again and again! Yes, Dexter series 4 onwards, which people at work have watched ahead of me despite me seeing it first, I'm looking at you right now!


So yeah, I think it's just a human brain thingie the same at the thing that lets us watch tv when there's a few channels and doesn't let us settle on anything to watch when we have 100. Just relax, you'll enjoy whatever you can trick your brain in to settling on, it's just that initial weird reticence you have to fight. I think many of us do. It's a weird life, and not one that anyone 100 year ago would understand if we tried to explain how we are bored because we have too many things to occupy our minds and time with! Even our younger selves would give us funny looks!

@Money: I've had that happen myself, from time to time, I look through my library of games and just can't find one I feel like playing. Sometimes it's because I'm just really not in the mood to play video games, and am just looking to play them out of habit, sometimes it's because I have so many choices that I go into a sort of "analysis paralysis" and can't decide on one in particular. Sometimes It's been because they're all too similar and I'm really not in the mood for that type of game. Judging by what you wrote about your pastimes lately, designing databases, etc. maybe the games you're looking at are just the wrong genre for you right now. A good way to figure out if that's the case is to search out some freeware or demo games in a genre you've never tried before, or one that you haven't tried in a long time, and just play some very different games, see if that re-kindles your interest, if so it may be that your taste in games has simply changed. I'd recommend trying something like management simulations since that seems to most closely align with the interests you mentioned in your post.

If the problem is just "analysis paralysis", then the best thing to do is just pick one, doesn't matter which one, and just start playing.

If the issue is that you can't get motivated, here's what I do when that happens: go out for a long walk around your neighborhood, look at lots of things in around you as your walking, and keep on walking until you feel yourself getting more energetic again. On you way there you may pass through other feelings, such as anger, grief or boredom, don't worry about that, just let them happen and pass, eventually you'll feel your old energetic self again, then you can go back to whatever it was you couldn't get motivated to do and try again, you'll probably feel very different about it by then and may find your interest has returned.

OML. OK I love horror films. Watching The Thing with Kurt Russell. In the beginning the spaceship is actually making a sound whilst travelling to earth. When is Hollywood get this stuff correct. Nothing makes any noise is space,it is a vacuum. Slaps palm to forehead multiple times.

But Sci-Fi would sound so boring...imagine Star Wars if the space battles were silent. All those lasers and explosions but no sound...

ian_scho wrote:@money, lack of game drive

There are sounds in Elite: Dangerous - you can hear your ship's engine noises and stuff. But there is an in-game explanation for this - any "external" noises you hear while in your ship are actually just being simulated by the ship itself. You know, like the way an indicator in a car makes a "ticking" noise even though there is no reason for it to do so beyond "people like to hear it make a noise so they know it's working" or whatever (same with mobile phones making those horrible beeping sounds when people press the buttons I suppose). So Elite ships basically detect what's going on around them and project suitable noises into the cockpit so the pilot has a sense of immersion/awareness and stuff .

Also, in a vacuum, the energy we perceive as "noise" still exists, it just gets transmitted in a different way that we don't perceive with our 5 senses. It would be more of a force wave.

TY SU. Never thought of it that way.

Seriously Unserious wrote:Also, in a vacuum, the energy we perceive as "noise" still exists, it just gets transmitted in a different way that we don't perceive with our 5 senses. It would be more of a force wave.

Sorry, this is non sense. Check with your physics teach.
Sound is a pressure wave. It cannot propagate in vaccum as already said.
What "energy", "force wave" are you talking about ?

Terkio. You hit the nail on the head. You just too badass man.

Firefly did no noise in space, but would find ways to cut in to atmosphered reactions, and Serenity went wit hthe 'low enough in an ion cloud for sound'. Star TRek (the first film) definitely had a comemnt at the start of no sound as a counterpoint to the chaos inside, but in general I can't recall what they did. In entertainment, sound is an important connection to what's going on, and silence can divorce from that. Everyone has a button that brings them out of something, but to far more people it would be a lack of sound in a film/tv than sound in space.

BSG went for a muted sound as a compromise, for exactly the emotion-divorcing reasons stated. They had tried no sound initially in a cut.

Watching the first Predator. Again in the beginning,Predator mother ship makes sounds in space. Also in Predators with Adrian Brody, they actually filmed part of it at Hamilton's Pool. It is a state park here in Texass. I have been there. Awesome place. Look it up,way cool.

OK enuff wit da sounds in space. Aliens are here and they walk amongst us. I have seen it firsthand. And if yourself does not believe in ET you like kinda missed something along the way.

terkio wrote:

Seriously Unserious wrote:Also, in a vacuum, the energy we perceive as "noise" still exists, it just gets transmitted in a different way that we don't perceive with our 5 senses. It would be more of a force wave.

Sorry, this is non sense. Check with your physics teach.
Sound is a pressure wave. It cannot propagate in vaccum as already said.
What "energy", "force wave" are you talking about ?

First of all, space is a vacuum in the sense that there is no atmosphere, not in the sense that there is no matter there. There is particles, just very, very sparse compared to what exists on an atmosphered planet like Earth or Mars.

Remember your law of the conservation of mass and energy. Sound is energy, when it hits a vacuum it does not suddenly cease to exist, that breaks the law of conservation of energy, it merely changes its form into a new kind of energy. I don't know the exact physics behind it as I'm not a physicist, but I do know that sound can't suddenly not exist, it has to change into a different form of energy. Perhaps the force wave was mixing 2 unrelated things but the energy behind the sound does turn into something.

I apologize for opening up this can of worms. Very interesting thoughts on the subject though. Most of the explainations are sailing right over my head.o_O

I think it is called entropy SU, been a long time since I read stuff on that. if I remember correctly, that is where energy is building up and continues to do so, but as I said, it's been a long time since reading about it. please enlighten me again, it's a good topic.

I can remember from GCSE Physics that "energy can be neither created nor destroyed, it only changes form" or words to that effect. So yes, if a load of sound energy entered a vacuum, I expect it would indeed have to change into a type of energy which could pass through - its frequency would change or something, I expect.

It does not enter.

Interesting.
This is not really sound that travelled to us from a black hole. That is sort of an artist view like some fake color pictures.

The sound waves were indirectly detected using the Chandra telescope

As far I know a telescope receives light. The Chandra telescope is of a special kind that detects X-rays.
Here are other "sounds from space", a mix where there are true sounds and others not so true.: http://www.astrosurf.com/luxorion/audiofiles.htm

Seriously Unserious wrote:the energy we perceive as "noise" still exists, it just gets transmitted in a different way

I guess the body (where the sound came from) would have to stop vibrating, even if it could not do it in the usual way of transferring it's energy to the atmosphere. Internal friction could slow it down, building up heat that could be released as electromagnetic waves.

I fully believe sound exists in space. But humans cannot here it. My pet peeve is Hollywood still making films where there are audible sounds. I understand they do this for dramatic effect. By the way,I am making progress in DM1. Had to go back a couple of levels to stock up on food and water. Then I can explore more futher down. OK I am just going to thow this out there : antimatter.

That seems plausible.