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      Welcome!   03/05/2016

      Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change.  If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away.  I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!
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22 minutes ago, mlooney said:

Just read my morning web comics.  Normally I might go back to sleep after I do this. Not freaking today.  Grrl Power, normally a light a funny comic is pure grade A Nightmare Fuel today.

Some of the comments for it bothered me more than the page itself...

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13 minutes ago, mlooney said:

Yeah, and I'm a self admitted pervert

I'm talking more about the fact that a character is in a position to be either dying or dead and some of the comments are "why didn't you draw her facing us so we could see her boobs!?!"

I'm just not into that sort of thing.

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1 hour ago, Scotty said:

I'm talking more about the fact that a character is in a position to be either dying or dead and some of the comments are "why didn't you draw her facing us so we could see her boobs!?!"

I'm just not into that sort of thing.

Bingo.

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Various monster lists, marking each one as to what general group and environment they belong in.  

 Monsters and beasts are more important than you might think in a Traveller based Sci Fi game, as the most likely population is 100,000 to 999,999 for a whole world with a size about 70% that of Terra.  Outside of the area right around the space port their is a lot of land that would be marked "here be Dragons" on old maps.  And for that matter on maps of the recently occupied world.

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30 minutes ago, mlooney said:

Various monster lists, marking each one as to what general group and environment they belong in.  

 Monsters and beasts are more important than you might think in a Traveller based Sci Fi game, as the most likely population is 100,000 to 999,999 for a whole world with a size about 70% that of Terra.  Outside of the area right around the space port their is a lot of land that would be marked "here be Dragons" on old maps.  And for that matter on maps of the recently occupied world.

Monster lists are a huge problem in convincing science fiction stories spanning large numbers of planets and environments. They really need to be very extensive in order to avoid repetition, not to mention varied in nature. In the earlier mentioned Star Wars: the Old Republic, a big problem is that so many monsters look like one another even on planets halfway across the galaxy from one another. This is of course partly because of the game engine -- good models take time to create and you can only have so many unless you are prepared to spend ludicrous amounts of money and programming time on them.

Then, as mlooney hints, there is the whole problem of discovering all the species extant on a whole planet. Humanity has existed on this planet for thousands of years and we still occasionally discover surprising new variants. Imagine just landing on a new world and then trying to work out what and where and how many potentially dangerous beasties there might be. Especially given that even on Earth, good camouflage has long been considered a winning evolutionary move.

mlooney, if you need a helping hand with monster lists and ideas for same, or even reading and editing them, I'd like to offer a hand. Or even some general editing. If nothing else, maybe I can provide some useful opinions or at least act as a sounding board.

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6 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

Monster lists are a huge problem in convincing science fiction stories spanning large numbers of planets and environments. They really need to be very extensive in order to avoid repetition, not to mention varied in nature. In the earlier mentioned Star Wars: the Old Republic, a big problem is that so many monsters look like one another even on planets halfway across the galaxy from one another. This is of course partly because of the game engine -- good models take time to create and you can only have so many unless you are prepared to spend ludicrous amounts of money and programming time on them.

…Humanity has existed on this planet for thousands of years…

There's the problem, then. Lots and lots of invasive species.

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6 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

mlooney, if you need a helping hand with monster lists and ideas for same, or even reading and editing them, I'd like to offer a hand. Or even some general editing. If nothing else, maybe I can provide some useful opinions or at least act as a sounding board.

Noted and will be put to use in a few weeks, I hope.

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11 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

Monster lists are a huge problem in convincing science fiction stories spanning large numbers of planets and environments. They really need to be very extensive in order to avoid repetition, not to mention varied in nature. In the earlier mentioned Star Wars: the Old Republic, a big problem is that so many monsters look like one another even on planets halfway across the galaxy from one another. This is of course partly because of the game engine -- good models take time to create and you can only have so many unless you are prepared to spend ludicrous amounts of money and programming time on them.

This was one of the main issues I saw people complaining about with No Man's Sky, sure there are a vast number of planets, but it very quickly turns into "if you've seen one planet, you've seen em all". I've even watched some Let's Plays on it and yeah, planets are either snowy, barren, temperate or toxic have very little in the way of flora and fauna, I think planets have a max of 12 different animal species and I think there's only 2 or 3 alien races total. As vast as the universe is in that game, it looks pretty darned empty.

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Traveller, even back in the 3 LBB days always had a very good animal creation system.  I have half a mind to add a half dozen more parts to it to expand to full monster.  I know that is what I am doing with tiny fey and slimes, just have a set of tables to generate their abilities with out have dozens of actual entries about them.  Leaning hard that way on the fey maidens so beautiful that they can stun/blind/enslave/drown/kill a mortal with but a single glance.  If nothing else make some male versions.

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18 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

Monster lists are a huge problem in convincing science fiction stories spanning large numbers of planets and environments. They really need to be very extensive in order to avoid repetition, not to mention varied in nature. In the earlier mentioned Star Wars: the Old Republic, a big problem is that so many monsters look like one another even on planets halfway across the galaxy from one another. This is of course partly because of the game engine -- good models take time to create and you can only have so many unless you are prepared to spend ludicrous amounts of money and programming time on them.

There is also such a thing as convergent evolution. Dolphins (the aquatic mammals) are not closely related to swallows (the birds) but have pretty much the same overall head-and-body shape. Hyenas are quite wolf-like (in both appearance and behavior) to the average non-specialist person but are more closely related to cats; fruit bats and carnivorous (mostly insectivorous) bats look quite similar but the former are almost-primates while the latter are almost-rodents; ferrets and mongooses look quite similar, but ferrets are related to dogs while mongooses are related to cats; the basic form and lifestyle of the mole (a common underground lawn pest) has apparently evolved at least three times, once in marsupials and twice - one is extinct - in mammals.

It's a reasonable bet that most non-sedentary water-breathing life in the oceans of another world will bear a strong resemblance to SOME sort of non-sedentary water-breathing life that exists, or used to exist, on earth, even if there is precisely zero common ancestry all the way back to the level of the stray interstellar-wandering amino-acid-bearing speck of dust. (And if they happen to resemble fish, human colonists will call them fish.)

(Of course, a good case can be made that we shouldn't colonize worlds with life on them.)

(The second half of that link reflects on a question asked on the previous comic page.)

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22 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

Bah. That is utter redundancy. I could have managed that in only 490 pages.

My translation has 559.  I guess he lost time somewhere.

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