I always thought of 1ups and Game Overs as pretty pointless in hacks nowadays. Ever think about an alternative? Since you are going the experience route, that implies you will be leveling up. What about making 1ups an instant level up and make them super scarce? Or do you have another idea?

Congrats on living another year on this planet without dying, @Emuz and @TKB! Hope nothing changes this year. Good luck!

Son of a bitch.

Son of a bitch.

Before I left for vacation, I bought Minecraft for XBLA. Now I'm stuck on it. In fact, just today, I spent two hours drawing blueprints for a massive building in paint. Tomorrow I get to find out exactly what kind of labor this will entail. It's a 59x60 footprint, but it's not completely square because that would be boring. It will be built like a massive skyscraper, but it's going to be built from the top layer of bedrock to the highest layer in the sky. Lots of the building is going to be built from Obsidian, and there's no creative mode.

Fuck, I can see this is going to be massive.

Posted by Trelior

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Posted by KP9000

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Son of a bitch.

Son of a bitch.

Before I left for vacation, I bought Minecraft for XBLA. Now I'm stuck on it. In fact, just today, I spent two hours drawing blueprints for a massive building in paint. Tomorrow I get to find out exactly what kind of labor this will entail. It's a 59x60 footprint, but it's not completely square because that would be boring. It will be built like a massive skyscraper, but it's going to be built from the top layer of bedrock to the highest layer in the sky. Lots of the building is going to be built from Obsidian, and there's no creative mode.

Fuck, I can see this is going to be massive.

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Unless you go Nether diving (I don't know if the Nether is even in the XBLA version yet) you will never, I repeat never procure enough obsidian to make something that large. Assuming the game is handled similarly to the vastly superior PC version, the world is 128 blocks from the lowest layer of bedrock to the world's sky barrier. So, assuming your non-square shape filled in corners as it turned, and that was the only use of obsidian in the whole structure, it would be anywhere from 30000 to 33000 blocks of obsidian. Even more if you're making your floors and stairs out of it.

Given that it takes fifteen seconds to mine a single block with a diamond pickaxe, which is the only way to get the resource block by the way, it would take an excess of five full days real time to mine it, let alone find the lava to make it. This is also assuming you don't misplace any blocks and have to remine them out.

Long story short... You're setting youself up for major disappointment.

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On another map I have six chests full of stacks of obsidian. I have my ways.

Neither of those, actually. It involves placing a single block inside a dispenser, while you repeatedly take it out and pick it up, while a friend breaks the dispenser. The end result is a never ending stack that you can just drop one by one on the floor and pick them all up. Nets about 10 obsidian per second, per person. And it works with any item!

But the building will be made up of other stuff too. Lapis Lazuli, good ol' stone, glass, sandstone, wool for interior (lol lightning) and probably more.

Gonna be fucking amazing. Just need to make a solid means of transport.

Posted by Nicole

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Also don't like the idea of paid DLC in a Mario game. But bleh.

I'll probably still end up buying it...

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Back in MY day we didn't HAVE no DLC. It wasn't even called that! We had to buy these cards to get what we want. And we had to buy an extra Game Boy Advance and the card reader to go with it! Oh yeah, let's not forget the cables! And here you are bitching about a quick, cheap way to get more Mario content. I oughta smack you, ya whippersnapper!

Seriously though, I did just preorder this along with a 3DS XL. I don't have a 3DS at all, so I figured why the fuck not, the platform is starting to get some love. I really just got it for Paper Mario.

Getting ready to /start/ mining away the 215,000 blocks required to have the space for this magnificent building. Perhaps I may die several hundred times due to fall damage.

Wish someone else has the XBLA version so they can die with me.

Posted by Liliana

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It rained a lot. I hate to say it, but... too much.

It also included hail.

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"Too much" for me would be so much that I cannot drive down the street without fear that water would destroy my 4x4. Or that it would destroy mine or a friend's house.

Hail is awesome to watch.

Except when I am watching it kill my vehicle.

Posted by Ryudo

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Build a ladder and some platforms our of dirt blocks to keep you from falling, then just tear them down when you're done. Always seemed to work well for me. Haven't logged into that game in forever...

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Well, if I'm going to build towers, I'd be building them to place TNT in strategic spots to get rid of the most amount of dirt. Right now, my strategy is to dig a hole all the way down to bedrock, then fill it all back in with TNT. So, since I have all this TNT, why not utilize it?

I'll probably build dirt towers when I finally start building this structure. I'm not sure when that'll be, but it's going to be glorious.

Yeah, Mondays. Today is stone cold fuck nuts. I went in to work at 6 in the morning, only to find out that the freight truck is late and will not be there until 10. So I drive back home and try to get a couple of hours of sleep, then head back to work. I unload the truck, then find out I have a furniture shipment. I finish unloading that and ANOTHER 18 wheeler was waiting! Holy fuck, man.

Yeah, I am tired.

Posted by DahrkDaiz

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for getting me back into rom hacking.

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I remember asking you if you planned on getting back into rom hacking shortly after you left and your answer was "nothing short of a SMB3 disassembly".

lol

In any event, that map... it looks like it's one of those spiffy free roaming maps. Except you can only go where there isn't anything but pipes and bare green. I'm not sure how limited you are with that map just yet, but I'd like to see some kind of pathway to better highlight where you can and can't go. But, seeing as you've just started, I'm sure it will happen in due time.

A couple of ideas have been running through my head, ever since I accidentally hit my alias button in IRC for the old board2 !radio command. Emuz lightly touched on the idea of starting up a Kafuka Radio, which, to me, sounds like a grand idea.

From that idea spawned another, and here's where it can get fun real fast: a Video Game Music competition. There was an old thread on board2 (which I can't link to right now since it's dead) where users would nominate songs they liked in the VG Music world. There were a few rules though; it had to be original, and one person could only nominate n songs. In the end, 128 songs were nominated, and two brackets of 64 were created. Each song had the song title, game it was from, a screenshot of the game boxart, and who nominated it. There was also a "best loser" bracket of 64. Users would make votes on their favorite songs of the round, which would be held daily, two to four songs per round depending on how far into the bracket we are. Tied songs would carry over to the next round where the next person to vote breaks the tie.

I'm not sure what the medium was that the thread author used to keep track of the brackets, it was some site you could go to and plug in info. But perhaps we could integrate some kind of bracket system into the board? It already seems like we could use it, because of the Kafuka Pokemon League thread.

These two ideas can be compounded to generate a nice chunk of activity and content for Kafuka. We need it. Perhaps the last 8 songs from each bracket could be the start of a Kafuka Radio playlist. Those songs would generally be liked by the community since those songs came out on top by popular vote.

What say ye?

Ninja Mario: I don't see any reason not to give him downward or at least downward diagonal shuriken abilities. Shurikens themselves don't seem like something that could do a lot of damage, so maybe you could just limit what they affect.

Boo Mario: I wish I was good enough to actually sprite for you, because all I can do is describe what I envision he might look like. Perhaps he's got an all white suit, not form fitting like his other clothes, but sheet-like and has a point near his backside like the raccoon tail. As far as functionality goes, why not have the game detect how many solid blocks he's gone through? if it's more than 3 or 4, then make him go out of his "transcendant mode".

I also would suggest, like Scrydan, to just make Mario small if he gets stuck in blocks. I can see that being a massive source of frustration if something like that happened to me.

Posted by Scrydan

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I wouldn't know too much about its setup as I haven't messed much in that area. Of course, I can see to working on what I can later on.

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Cool. I don't know much about the setup either, all I know is how it all went down, which is pretty much all explained in my prior post. We pretty much have to fill in the blanks.

What about going public with this idea? Would it do any good? Would we be unwise to do so due to the possibility of deflating its impact if we had otherwise chose to keep it secret until it was finished?

Try and clear the CMOS. See if there's a battery somewhere you can remove. It might not have liked being shut off in that boot screen, and/or might have detected something awry with your keyboard. Try and keep the keyboard disconnected and turn it on after you've cleared the CMOS.

EDIT: There might be a button somewhere you can push or a jumper you can move one pin over to clear the CMOS. Being that it's a laptop, it's not likely there's an easy way to do this other than pulling the battery.

What I'm running right now is this beast and it's almost dead. I've ran that shit into the ground. There's no CPU fan, and the poor CPU is degrading to the point where I can barely play YouTube videos anymore. I figure it's a matter of time before all hell breaks loose and my old P4 gives up the ghost.

So, here's what I've decided to go with. I'm going for a DIY build, to keep costs low and to get exactly what I want.

CPU: Intel Core i7-3770K Quad-Core $340
This is an Ivy Bridge (3rd Gen) Core i7. I really like the lower power consumption with this processor as well as the speed and notoriety of this line. I'll be doing things that most definitely require the processing power, such as Photoshop and rendering various things like video and emulation.

CPU Cooling: Corsair Hydro Series H100 = $108
Seemed to me that if I was going to go with a high(er) end Intel processor (which has been unlocked and can be OC'd) I'd need to go with at least a decent cooler. Dunno about liquid cooling, this will be my first one. I'll figure out installation when it arrives. I read the charts though, this thing really keeps the heat under control.

Motherboard: Asus Momentus V Gene = $195
I really liked this mobo. It's a small form factor, but doesn't really lack in features or compromise on quality. It supports WiDi (Wireless display up to 1080p) and has slots for an mSATA (SSD) and a miniPCIe slot, which I will be getting a dual-band wireless b/g/n bluetooth combo card for. It's got a great sound package on-board, but designed it in such a way that it's completely isolated from the rest of the board. Uses socket LGA1155 and has the Intel Z77 chipset.

Storage: Mushkin 120GB SSD = $140
This uses the mSATA interface, which is supported on the motherboard I am using. I am going to forego a hard drive for now, using my USB3.0 external laptop drive as supplemental storage until I get another hard drive to go in there.

Graphics: SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 6870 = $170
Not really sure about this purchase. Seems OK, but I feel like I could be getting something more powerful and not have to upgrade this again in like a year. I'd ideally like to run my two monitors (1280x1024 DVI and 1920x1080 DVI or HDMI) at the same time.

Memory: G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB = $75
Two sticks of 4GB. I figured not many people would use more than this, and if I do, I'll have 2 extra slots. The price seemed good for what it was, timing is 9-9-9-24 and speed is 1866MHz.

Power: Corsair Enthusiast Series TX650 = $80
Nothing really to say about this, seems to meet my needs, looks nice, great reviews, well known brand.

Case: Cooler Master Storm Enforcer = $72
Seems like a great case to put everything in, and it's RED, too. I really like it not being yet ANOTHER BLUE LED out in the wild. On top of that, it supports the extra large radiator (240mm) that the cooling solution uses. It'll be one quiet machine.


You may also notice that I don't have a DVD drive on there, because I already have an external one. I'm not really bothered by having the thing on the outside of my case. If it really gets to me, I'll just take it out of the enclosure and slap it in.

Another thing is, should I really bother with buying an OS from a retailer? Or can I get a reliable one elsewhere?

Also, feel free to point out any weaknesses in this setup and contribute substitutions and/or better prices if you know of any.

Going with Windows 7. I'll probably want to dick around with some distribution of Linux, too.

I've made some changes to that hardware setup. I've changed the motherboard to an Asus Sabertooth at $240. This changes my ability to have mSATA and mini PCIe devices. That means I'll have to get a hard drive and wireless card. I went with a 500GB HDD and a PCIe wireless NIC. Also got a bluetooth dongle since I'll probably want to emulate some Wii.

I know my PSU is overkill for what I have, but I'll want plenty of room for upgrades in the future. Especially since I'll eventually get two new (better) video cards down the road.

Orders have been placed, shipping will occur soon.