Improbable Island Message of the Day (MoTD)

The new combat system in a nutshell!
Admin CavemanJoe – 2011-05-24 07:31:11 [Permalink]
Corporal Punishment will be telling you about this shortly, but for now, here's a quick run-down:

Orange targets are guarded. Green targets are vulnerable. Hit targets to change their colours, and the colours of other targets too. Every monster reacts differently.

When damage is dealt to a target, its SHOCK value goes up (that's the percentage marker to the right of the target). When SHOCK reaches 100% on a body part, it's disabled, and thus permanently vulnerable. Body parts recover from shock fairly quickly, so if you're trying to disable a particular body part, keep up the attacks on that area.

When all body parts are green (whether by being vulnerable or being disabled), the monster can't attack or defend.

Monsters will occasionally gear up for a strong attack - that's when one target turns red and all the others go vulnerable. Hit the red target to try to block the attack, or take advantage of the other targets being vulnerable. Disabled body parts can't do strong attacks.

Using grenades, skills, Insults and so forth will result in a random target being hit.

Have fun!

Thanks for your support!
Admin CavemanJoe – 2011-05-23 18:46:41 [Permalink]
Okay, the new dev machine is here, and I'm hurriedly continuing work on our awesome new combat system. Thanks to everyone who donated!

In other news, our World Community Grid team is now the fourteenth-largest in the world, with 2,093 members! Another hundred-and-fifty-odd members and we'll be the thirteenth largest. :)

In other other news, we just need a few more pre-orders on our merchandise shop (link at the top of the page) and we'll be ready to place our order. Fancy an Improbable Island mug or T-shirt? Now's an excellent time to grab one!

Have fun!

Folks, I'm in trouble because of tea.
Admin CavemanJoe – 2011-05-13 21:17:06 [Permalink]
Those who follow my Twitter feed will know that yesterday I managed to spill tea in my laptop's keyboard. The keyboard is currently out of the laptop and sitting in some rice to dry out what the air compressor couldn't remove (and the bastard thing's riveted together, too, so I can't dismantle it and do a proper job). While removing the keyboard, I figured I'd whizz the screen mask off and get rid of the dust that had somehow managed to find its way inside.

CRACK.

Shit.

It's a 2004 Toshiba Portege M200, and it's the best laptop I've ever owned. The part number for the screen mask is P000388420.

The screen mask costs a hundred dollars.

A HUNDRED DOLLARS. FOR A SHEET OF PLASTIC. OR YOU CAN GET A SCRATCHED ONE FOR SEVENTY-FIVE.

For $130-odd, I can get an entire top-half assembly - panel, digitizer, bezel, mask, body, backlight, inverter, wiring harness, the works. For about $180, I can get a whole new M200. But for just the plastic bit that covers the panel? A hundred bloody dollars, and there's no cheap aftermarket equivalent.

There's a guy on eBay selling a set of six for two hundred bucks. I suspect that last week he bought a set of seven for two hundred and twenty.

I'm right smack in the middle of writing our new combat system, and I can't be without a computer. I figure I drank a hundred-dollar cup of tea either way, but I reckon I can get one of my mates to take this working-but-distracting one off my hands for a hundred or so, then bump up to a M400 (which is like the M200 I have now, but a bit bigger, a bit faster, with an optical drive and only five years old) which go for about $240-odd on fleabay.

So, I need either a couple of hundred bucks in a hurry, or a replacement screen mask (and probably a keyboard too). That part number again, P000388420 - if you've got a broken M200 lying around that you don't need, and would post it to me, there's a metric shitload of Supporter Points in it for you.

Thanks for your support, and I'll endeavour not to break this one.

-CMJ

Merchandising and distributed computing!
Admin CavemanJoe – 2011-05-05 19:08:43 [Permalink]
Hello, folks! I've got two awesome bits of news for you!

Awesome piece of news the first:
You've been asking us for ages to MAKE A BLOODY T-SHIRT OR SOMETHING ALREADY CAVEMAN JOE, I KNOW YOU THINK IT'S TOO MUCH HASSLE BUT DAMN IT SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY - so I'm going to shut up and take your money! Esteemed Island moderator Zolotisty has been hard at work on creating some merchandising for us, sorting out a decent supplier, and getting everything lined up - and now we're all ready to take some pre-orders! We have a T-shirt, a mug, a really cool poster, and a fantastic nickel/enamel keychain for you to buy!

Let me stress that this stuff isn't your usual crappy print-on-demand CafePress tat that'll fall apart after two washes and make kittens cry. Zolotisty chose our supplier very carefully, and they guarantee no kitten tears! The mug in particular is a very awesome mug. It's all tapered and happymaking.

Because we have a decent supplier, and we're not doing print-on-demand tat, we have to get some pre-orders going so that we can put in a big order from the factory to get us going. Our shop is at http://merch.improbableisland.com. You know what you must do.

Awesome piece of news the second:
Our World Community Grid team is about to pass four hundred years of distributed computing! Now's a fantastic time to join our team, because you get free Supporter Points for donating your spare CPU cycles to humanitarian research! In case you don't know what that means, it means that we've made a computer game that cures cancer. That would have gotten us some excellent publicity, but in the same week that we started the project, there was a video of a kitten asleep on top of another kitten. I can't compete with that. If you're curious and perhaps if you're an awesome person who wants to help the world out a little bit, click the link at the bottom of the right-hand stats bar that says "Help us cure cancer, get free Supporter Points!"

The latest really cool thing that World Community Grid is doing involves new methods of water filtration. Guys, one in six people can't drink the water around them, and about one in three of us don't have any sort of sanitation, which means that - here's your depressing statistic for the day - on average, one kid dies every twenty-two seconds from a disease brought on by not having clean water. It's usually diarrhea that does them in.

Now, we've got technology for filtering dirty water, but it's too expensive to deploy in the sort of numbers we'd need to stop people dying by drinking shitty water. We've got some ideas concerning carbon nanotubes, which we can make as cheap as chips - but the pores are so small that you need massive amounts of pressure to force the water through, meaning that the equipment needed is, again, too expensive to do much good. However, back in 2005 we had an unexpected surprise - certain arrangements of carbon nanotubes allowed water to flow much faster than expected, while still allowing the same high level of filtration. Now, World Community Grid wants to use your computer's idle time to simulate a whole bunch of different arrangements at a molecular level, to see which one is the best.

So, join our project and maybe the world can move on, and have things to worry about that aren't "Will drinking this water kill me faster than not drinking at all." And I'll give you some Supporter Points too!

Have fun!

-CMJ

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