Awesome Stuff You Have To Share, Part 3: You Can't Handle The Awesome!

[brujon]

Yes, from what i understand TSR was interested in republishing Wormy and they got into a bitter dispute over that, and he left, angrily, wanting nothing to do with the fantasy business anymore. I tend to think he was a purist, and thought that the business of fantasy gaming wasn't pure anymore, it had already sold out to stockholders and he wanted nothing to do with that. He went on to become a taxi driver, and was rediscovered when someone - who completely didn't know who he was, but was writing a piece on cab driver, published an interview with a picture. That's in 2002, and the Internet was already pretty big, and people immediately recognized him and some started trying to get in touch with him. Many tried to reconcile him with the fantasy business but he was adamant on not doing it. In his final years, though, after the cab company he worked for went under, hewas finally ready to return to the fantasy business, but cancer got him 3 weeks before he would appear on a conference where he would talk about Wormy and his work and maybe of republishing, or continuing the series.

The world lost an irreplaceable person right then and there, and the fantasy world wept. I didn't know about him, because i never really looked into any of the older editions of D&D. I never got into the original, wasn't born yet, never got into the first AD&D, i wasn't born yet, and i was too young for the 2nd AD&D as well. I caught SOME of the final days of AD&D with Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale and Pool of Radiance. NEVER saw any 2nd ed material for myself, in person, only in pdf's, and never read anything of the older editions EXCEPT the first monster manual, because it had some very amusing critters that weren't reprinted again (OOTS led me into that...).  I only started really playing D&D with 3rd edition - like many here, i suppose - and am very rules dumb towards anything other than it. Never played 4th ED and never will. Didn't like it one bit.

But now i kind of feel like i want to read the older rulebooks, and see what it was like? Just because of the art.

[Raineh Daze]

I think I could maybe get into 2E.

Because 2E doesn't require adapting everything myself in order to set a campaign in Netheril.

And to hell with everything else, that setting is awesome. Modern amenities, cheap magical items, and (pick the right age) you always have an enemy if you run short of more original plots? Hell yes.

[Gazzien]

I think I could maybe get into 2E.

Because 2E doesn't require adapting everything myself in order to set a campaign in Netheril.

And to hell with everything else, that setting is awesome. Modern amenities, cheap magical items, and (pick the right age) you always have an enemy if you run short of more original plots? Hell yes.

You don't even need to pick the right age; just say "Phaerimm" and be done with it xD

[Jackinthegreen]

Youtube abuse recovery.

[Kethrian]

I'll just leave this here ...

And there might be a sequel to awesome in the works ...

[Kuroimaken]

I didn't really understand what the first one WAS. 

[Kethrian]

I didn't really understand what the first one WAS. 

Basically?  WEBM is a new file format that is completely superior to, and will completely replace, GIFs.

[brujon]

Win win. Gifs are a relic from web 1.0, this new format brings more quality, i'm completely for it.

[Libertad]

Guy on Reddit writes up history of Edition Wars as a bardic legend:

Gather round, brave adventurers! Dairymancer, cast Create Butter! I shall regale now to you a tale as old as Last Thursday, a tale of anger, betrayal, and liking things other people don't like. Hear ye now the tale... of the Edition Wars.

What's that, young one? Which Edition Wars? Hah! You fool yourself, child. They are all the same, they have never ended. To this day, the Warriors of AD&D cry out in anguish at what remains of their people, and still others scoff at the notion that a Dwarf can have class levels!

No, the wars have never ended and, in the opinion of this poor bard, never will! Though there are some who speak of a day of reckoning, when Gygax returns to the world, bringing about the legendary Days of Games Just Being Fun And People Stop Hating On Each Other Unless You're Talking About FATAL Because Seriously What The Shit.

But this time may never arrive, and tales of peaceful and bountiful times are hardly interesting to tell or hear! But we cannot simply start the story from the beginning, for it doesn't have one. So let us start before The Sundering.

The powerful Wizards of the Coast had taken the treasures of Gygax, and made them their own. With powerful magic and playtesting, they released The Third Edition.

Oh! The gnashing of teeth, the tearing of hair! Cries of anguish rose up in a hellish chorus! "Feats!" the voices cried! "These foul Wizards have made a game where you can accomplish things without a roll! Unfair! Overpowered! Nerf! This is not Dungeons and Dragons! This limits role-playing!" The voices wailed and moaned, drowning out the more ancient cries claiming Elves and Dwarves had taken jobs reserved for Humans.
But time passed. Some stayed behind, unwilling to enter the realm crafted by the Wizards, preferring instead to calculate their attack rolls with subtraction because it "makes more sense that way."

Others went forward into this new world. Why, Feats were not so bad after all! There was celebration and jubilee as customization of characters swept over the land.

But the world was not perfect, cracks and holes littered the landscape. The people cried out to the Wizards, and the Wizards listened. From on High they crafted a new world, 3.5! Cracks were sewn shut, holes sealed, Bards were less shitty!

Some players gazed upon this new world with delight! Still others cried out yet again, "Money-grubbing wizards! It has scant been half a decade and a new edition has come out, complete with a million splat-books! And Create Water is still broken!" Distrust was sewn through the community, with many believing the Wizards cared more about lining their vaults with gold than they did creating a good game. And so the wars continued.
And then The Sundering happened.

The Wizards, like Baalzebul, were never satisfied with their previous works, and set out to create a new world, even sooner than they had done before! And once more, great cries erupted from the masses! "Powers! Roles!" the voices cried! "The Wizards seek to copy the World of Warcraft! They just want more money! Cookie cutter characters! This limits role-playing!"

And new banners arose to take up this fight! Paizo, an experienced apprentice of the Wizards, looked back upon the damaged world being left behind, and the people who refused to leave it. Paizo took pity upon them, and created Pathfinder to heal old wounds. No more could Create Water be used to give an enemy an aneurysm! No longer did players have to take a Prestige Class to avoid falling behind their comrades! And Paizo saw what it had made, and said it was good, and the players rejoiced.

But not all were so pleased. There were some, the vicious few, who resented those who had stepped into the new world, believing them to be traitors and trend-chasers! And on the other side, there were those who looked back with mocking pity, believing them to be nothing more than grognards who could not leave a dying world! And though they lived so far apart, though they never actually had to interact with one another, still they went to war.
These warriors will never cease their battles. They spend their time playing a great meta-RPG where, like Highlander, there can be only one! But a world cannot be slain, and so they fight on, eternally cursed to be taunted by the fact that some people like things that they don't like.

[oslecamo]

I didn't really understand what the first one WAS. 

Basically?  WEBM is a new file format that is completely superior to, and will completely replace, GIFs.

What exactly makes it superior? The part where it drains a computer's CPU faster than a vampire drains life energy? Or that half the time it will demand extra plug-ins of dubious origin to work at all?

Oh, wait, slightly shinier graphics. I forgot that alone is nowadays considered a valid excuse to sacrifice everything else.

While GIF is widely supported and light on your CPU, it will keep being greatly used.

[Kethrian]

What exactly makes it superior? The part where it drains a computer's CPU faster than a vampire drains life energy? Or that half the time it will demand extra plug-ins of dubious origin to work at all?

Oh, wait, slightly shinier graphics. I forgot that alone is nowadays considered a valid excuse to sacrifice everything else.

While GIF is widely supported and light on your CPU, it will keep being greatly used.

You mean that having a full colour range instead of the 256 limit of GIFs isn't superior?  Or its silky-smooth 60fps?  Or that it can play sound?  Or that a WEBM file of the exact same thing as a particular GIF image is smaller in size, therefore requiring less bandwidth while still also offering that superior graphical quality?  Or that most web browsers already have support for WEBM format built in, and therefore don't need "extra plug-ins of dubious origin"?  In fact, Internet Explorer and Safari are the only major browsers which need 3rd party support, Google is providing said support for IE, and more than a few media players either already support it, or have such support in the works, including Adobe Flash, Winamp, VLC, Miro, and MPlayer.  Hell, even Skype has implemented the codec for it!  And "YouTube has committed to encode its entire portfolio of videos to WebM."

Guess what?  CPUs will get bigger and faster, and my 5+ year old PC can run WEBMs without issue, even at 720p 60fps with sound.  Tell me, how nasty does a GIF get on your CPU at 720p resolution and 20 seconds long?  Because I'd like to know how it actually compares to an equivalent WEBM.

[sirpercival]

As a fan of the FATE system, this looks really cool and I may have to get a copy.

[oslecamo]

What exactly makes it superior? The part where it drains a computer's CPU faster than a vampire drains life energy? Or that half the time it will demand extra plug-ins of dubious origin to work at all?

Oh, wait, slightly shinier graphics. I forgot that alone is nowadays considered a valid excuse to sacrifice everything else.

While GIF is widely supported and light on your CPU, it will keep being greatly used.

You mean that having a full colour range instead of the 256 limit of GIFs isn't superior?  Or its silky-smooth 60fps?  Or that it can play sound?  Or that a WEBM file of the exact same thing as a particular GIF image is smaller in size, therefore requiring less bandwidth while still also offering that superior graphical quality?  Or that most web browsers already have support for WEBM format built in, and therefore don't need "extra plug-ins of dubious origin"?  In fact, Internet Explorer and Safari are the only major browsers which need 3rd party support, Google is providing said support for IE, and more than a few media players either already support it, or have such support in the works, including Adobe Flash, Winamp, VLC, Miro, and MPlayer.  Hell, even Skype has implemented the codec for it!  And "YouTube has committed to encode its entire portfolio of videos to WebM."

Guess what?  CPUs will get bigger and faster, and my 5+ year old PC can run WEBMs without issue, even at 720p 60fps with sound.  Tell me, how nasty does a GIF get on your CPU at 720p resolution and 20 seconds long?  Because I'd like to know how it actually compares to an equivalent WEBM.

If I want 720 P, I use a true video format like mpeg, avi or whatnot, that have the nice side effect of not draining CPUs to a crawl, thank you very much. The main point of GIF has always been to have small videos in a light format that can quickly work in the background while other stuff runs. My work more often than not involves leaving the computer grinding down big pieces of code for some minutes at a time, so GIFs are something I can watch in between without slowing down the whole process. And that's something a lot of other people do as well.

No matter how strong CPUs get, usage efficiency is always important. If you want to burn your money in a latest tech water-cooled super CPU just so you can see WEBMs without slowdown, that's your choice. But most other people will still choose to use their computer's processing power in more efficient ways, and thus GIFs will remain important as something you can use while running other tasks that are more CPU intensive.

That youtube has commited to encode its entire portfolio of videos to WebM sure helps explains why that site keeps running worst and worst in every machine I have acess to over the last years. Stay classy, google!

[Raineh Daze]

Strictly speaking, WebM is a true video format (and I'm not sure .avi stuff is compressed at all), and I have no idea why you'd think otherwise.

And unless you're using the HTML5 option, it's adobe and flash you need to take up the video player issues with, because youtube's video stuff is still encoded in .flv, to the best of my memory.

(Also, I've never had any trouble with WebM stuff, whilst even on this thing--a gen 4 i7--any long .gif at all I have to watch play one frame at a time until it's all done once, in a tiny little box, before I can actually tell what's going on properly). And using an image format for videos is just annoying. Animated avatars and signatures... ugh...

[oslecamo]

Because it isn't supported by any of the video processing software I know? If I can't edit it in my computer, screw that noise.

AVI indeed isn't compressed, but if hard drive space is the key factor, then GIF wins. Heck, it's the reason why it has always been so popular. You can make nice GIFs that fill just a few kylobytes, while WEBM is taking up megabytes. That's just, you know, three orders of grandeur. Where you store one WEBM, you can store 1000 GIFs.

What some people don't seem to realize is that you can make great animations without need of 720 p or high definition or whatever's  the latest graphical fad is.

[Kethrian]

Anything that works with Matroska works with WEBM.

Try converting a GIF into a WEBM.  The WEBM file will be smaller in size.  So, no, GIFs lose when it comes to hard drive space, too.

What some grognards don't seem to realize is that you can make better animations with better formats that aren't over a quarter-century old, that take up less bandwidth to stream, better colour resolution, better animation speed, better practically everything.

[trappedslider]

nerds i tell you.... fanbois too 

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/what-is-webm-and-can-it-dethrone-the-gif

[Kethrian]

Eh, I fancy myself more as a geek than a nerd, but close enough.

[trappedslider]

Eh, I fancy myself more as a geek than a nerd, but close enough.

  how dare you contradict my funny

[Raineh Daze]

Because it isn't supported by any of the video processing software I know? If I can't edit it in my computer, screw that noise.

AVI indeed isn't compressed, but if hard drive space is the key factor, then GIF wins. Heck, it's the reason why it has always been so popular. You can make nice GIFs that fill just a few kylobytes, while WEBM is taking up megabytes. That's just, you know, three orders of grandeur. Where you store one WEBM, you can store 1000 GIFs.

What some people don't seem to realize is that you can make great animations without need of 720 p or high definition or whatever's  the latest graphical fad is.

Unless the metadata for the video is that enormous (unlikely), then a GIF of identical resolution will lose out. The simple fact is that it's basically loading every frame of the video and then some, all uncompressed, means it will take up more space than an actual video format.

Honestly, I don't want HD resolutions on short clips, but I want the ability to have something bigger than 100x100 pixels. That's tiny. That's still tiny if you go back to resolutions of 800x600 for monitors.