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1.  A nonluminous celestial body larger than an asteroid or comet, illuminated by light from a star, such as the sun, around which it revolves. In the solar system there are nine known planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.

It's a simple definition agreed, but it has worked for years.

You must have used a different source than I did for the planet definition. This itself shows that there was a problem with that definition, since we came up with two different (albeit very close) definitions. So having a unified definition is actually good, because there is only one way to define a planet.

Anyway, there is no clear-cut definition for asteroids, either.

Hogwash.  Quantify very nearly for me.  All of the planets swing in elliptical orbits, whether extreme or not.  Nevertheless, Pluto's orbital shape isn't the issue here, it's the overlap with Neptune.

Of course it is not the *shape* that is the issue (I didn't imply it was. Pluto actually has a fairly spherical shape, but that partly comes from the fact that it's a binary system with Charon, so tidal forces help to achieve the sperical shape.)

The issue is the *mass* and the *force of gravity* that awakens from that mass. A planet - according to the new definition - should have enough mass to generate sufficient gravity to form a sphere on its own, without outside help.

This is also the reason for the clause to "clear the neighborhood": if a planet is massive enough, it'll have enough gravity to attract smaller bodies from a distance, thus sweeping an elliptical path in the accretion disk around a newly formed star. A small body would have a lot less gravity (gravity weakens according to the inverse square law), so it would have a lot less chance to do the same.

That's why there are no significant bodies around the orbit of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, etc. - they swept a significant path out by accreting matter from the dust when they formed.

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Note: I think you have a misunderstanding here. I just realized, that when you talk about shape, you talk about the shape of the orbit, right? Ignore this if not.

The shape of the orbit was not even a concern for Pluto - it was the *mass* of the planet that was a issue. The shape of the orbit didn't matter at all - it is not a requirement for a planet (even according to new rules) to have a nearly circular orbit. The requirement is to have a nearly spherical shape for the *planet* itself.
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And I think it is wrong to ask for an actual, quantified rule. Astronomers are well aware that the classification is artificial - it's really there to help sorting different bodies in the sky better. If we started quantifying, we could have 9 categories for planets right away.

So "very nearly spherical" tells us a good rule of thumb to make a decision, especially because we use the mass and the force of gravity as the basis, which are well-known quantities for known celestial bodies.

Mr. Colossal's links are right: there is no overlap between the orbit of Pluto and Neptune. The problem is that Pluto has a tilted orbit, so it implies that it didn't form as part of the planet formation process in the solar system.

When a star forms, a significant amount of matter orbits it, shaped like a wide, narrow disk, in the plane of the star's equator. This accretion disk is the source for the planets' material: there are different chunks of matter in the disk. Larger chunks have slightly greater gravity, so they have a better chance of attracting other (smaller) chunks and become even larger. But this results in planets in the plane of the accretion disk. Pluto could not have formed this way because of its tilted orbit - it must have joined the inner solar system in a different way and got hooked by the Sun's gravity.

[very nearly spherical]

We've went with a simple but effective definition of a planet for many years but now it's extremely necessary to create an overcomplicated one?

As far as I know, there was no clear definition for planets, but I might be wrong. The definition that I knew was that a planet is a celestial body that orbits a star and does not shine with its own light. A comet can easily make this definition, while we clearly don't intend to classify it as a planet.

The 'very nearly' clause in their definition is absolutely arbitrary as well.  What classifies very nearly spherical?  They haven't bothered to release evidence of what 'very nearly means' aside from our existing 8 planets and Pluto, so I really can't respect this kind of arbitrary science.

"Very nearly" is actually a fairly close definition. It means, that the planet has large enough mass so that gravity can distort it's shape into a perfect sphere.

However, all planets rotate around their axis (it's impossible to not to*), and the forces that awake because of the rotation slightly distort the shape to "very nearly spherical": the planet is squeezed along the rotation axis and bulges out a bit along its equator perpendicular to the rotation axis.

So, if a celestial bode doesn't have a large enough mass, gravity will not be strong enough to distort its shape.

* A planet *may* lose its angular momentum over time, due to forces acting on it and stop rotating. Earth, for example, will stop rotating in the distant future, becase tidal friction is slowing down its rotation.

I'd still like to know why they feel that 'clearing the neighborhood' around its orbit is tantamount to a planet's behavior.  Does this mean if Venus' orbit shifts slightly and its path overlaps with Saturn it will become a dwarf planet as well?  According to the new definitions the answer is yes.

All planets orbit their star in an elliptical orbit. Even a theoretical perfect circle orbit is elliptical, as a circle is just an extreme case for an ellipse. Anyway, Pluto's orbit is highly elliptical and tilted, which suggests that it didn't form as planets of the solar system, but in some other way.


I actually find it somewhat amusing to see what people think about Pluto. I just came back from Washington DC and I saw that inside the space museum, the part regarding Pluto was framed black and someone put a flower under it.

Pluto is not going away, it's going to be a named part of the solar system, it just won't be called a "planet" anymore.

Wow, this is great news! I never played StS 3D, because it was 3D.

Will there be a patch for this game? I tried looking on the IA forums but the "relevant" thread seems to have lost focus over the past few days.

I think it was a lot weaker than the first movie (which I consider among the best movies I've seen), although I agree that some parts of it were hilarious. Overall, however, I'd say it's 3 out of 5. This one is very long, with a *lot* of unnecessary special effects.

Spoiler

The sea monster was a cool idea, but in the end they overdid it and became boring. I think less (and less intense) fighting and screaming would've made for a lot better movie.

[close]

I also thought that the characters (including Jack Sparrow) were a lot like cardboard figures, not as witty and lively as in the first movie, maybe because of the weaker story. I didn't feel this one had a well thought-out storyline. They tried to put loads of twists into the story - again less would've been more.

I'm a bit disappointed, because I eagerly awaited this one, but I may go and see the third movie, too.

Finished it, great game. The story is very well done and everything goes together well (music, graphics, etc.) However, the parser really needs a lot more work, in it's current state it's very weak and it gets in the way of playing. I don't mind playing parser-based games, but the parser must be very flexible to understand different sentences. More parser shortcuts for common phrases would be nice, too. I typed "look around" very frequently, it became annoying after a while.

Looking forward for more Yahtzee games.

I'm sure once you learn one 3D program, the others are a breeze to adapt to. Unless lightwave is super-freaky and non-compliant to any software or 3D standard.

I'm not quite sure of that... I think I'm relatively proficient with Rhino, but using Blender is a nightmare for me. I couldn't even figure out how to rotate the views. (Reading the docs would help of course, but that's something I didn't do with Rhino.)

Good start (quite scary, as a matter of fact), but I found mutiple bugs with the game, hopefully there'll be an updated release.

1. The game seems to stuck after quitting. It happens almost every time I quit: notes.exe stays in the process list.

2. The parser is fairly weak: it doesn't recognize a lot of words for things right on the screen and in many cases words have suprising synonyms. "Search" seems to stand for "Open", etc. This is probably the only area that needs more work.

3. There are some minor graphical glitches in the hotel dining room: the back row tables have some walkbehinds messed up: some parts show in front of Trilby.

4. The hand-written font is a bit hard to read. It's not too bad, but it'd be nice to have a bit of antialiasing on the letters or at least have the double pixels removed. This is only nitpicking, though.

Atmosphere-wise, this game is about the scariest game I ever played - it's downright disturbing. I was never a fan of horror and Yahtzee has the ability to tell a story in a way that hair stands up on my back. I thouroughly enjoyed his other games (1213, 5DAS, 7DAS and GFW), so I may come back to this one to finish it.

I wanted to ask... Specially to those who have had long relationships... What the hell happens in the 3rd year? It's the crisis year! It's an axioma! I haven't discovered a couple with those problems!

Ye be warned, those who have been 17 months with a girl...

Nothing special happens. It helps, if she's not only your girlfriend, but best friend as well. I guess I'm lucky with my wife.

interesting... is that why you are called Traveler, because you move to escape your problems?!?

Nope   I found a job in the US. And my forum name really came by a game idea I had (but no time to complete) - I stuck with the name, though.

But otherwise, I really meant what I wrote, as I found that's the only thing that works (it's pretty much the same that Helm wrote): do a clean cut and don't look back. I don't keep in touch with any exes in any way and I don't care about them anymore.

Edit: ha ha ha, that link is hilarious! 

AND now if anyone knows the best way for me to sort my shit out I'd be greatly apprecitated.

I don't want to sound too harsh, but move to a different town, get a new phone and email address. That worked for me - I now live ~9000 km-s from where I used to. 

Victor felt a numb pain as he looked at the building of the Alfred T. Pott Children's Home. "Children's Home!" he thought. "For kids without parents."

Since Mom and Dad were murdered two months ago, Victor's life changed dramatically. When Uncle Barry became his legal guardian, he also took charge of the family wealth - a huge fortune indeed. "Worry not, my young Victor, all will be taken care of." he said after the funeral, sitting in the leather chair in which Dad used to sit. A week later he sent Victor here, to relax a bit and to get to know other kids. At least that's what he said.

Victor didn't mind all that much, he felt uneasy around Uncle Barry, so a small change was welcome. Being only 14, he didn't know much about wealth and finances. The place looked friendly enough, there were other kids around and he had some time to remember his parents in the quiet countryside. There was only one thing that puzzled him: why were there guard dogs everywhere?



I used  this image as a reference. And - as a bonus - here is a different angle of the building (this doesn't have all the finishing touches that my entry has.)

Will there be an extension on this one? I have an image in the works but not done yet.

Next: Damn it, those ARE ants!

Thanks for the ideas, guys!

Evil: the scientist knew the size of the machine, it was carefully designed. (Actually there is some empty space inside the machine cover. The machine is a black hole generator - but pssst! Only the killer is supposed to know that!   )  I may do some tweaking on the machine, like adding some more detail so that it doesn't look so neat.

[lgm]: the walls do have some cracks (at the vents, at the pipes' end, etc.), but these are unfortunately very small/faint. I wasn't sure how strong to make them (they were done in Photoshop after rendering the image; I may have to use textures for those, too, to make it easier to keep the perspective.)

MashPotato: I agree with you that the light is a bit too strong at the walls, but unfortunately there isn't much that I can do about it. If I decrease the intensity of the light, it'll become darker even in the center of the room, where I think it's just fine. Flamingo unfortunately doesn't have light falloff. I'll try to come up with something and see if I can tweak the light a bit. I don't want to add new light sources, because that wouldn't fit the scene.

Krysis: I won't change the logo as that would require quite a bit of work (I can only type the Cyrillic characters in Character Map, which is a bit crude.   ) I'll resize the picture, right now it's about 70 cm tall, I'll make it about a meter, but I'll keep the golden frame, because we mostly had them in golden (I'm from Hungary, we had some Lenin pics too.) Adding some devices is a good idea, I'll see to it.

Hajjamujja: I agree, the big machine takes too much focus, so I'll size it down a bit. I'll also add some more detail to it. The player could already interact with the chalkboard, there is quite a bit of space between the desk and the cabinet (almost 2 meters), it's just not that visible because of perspective.

I'll upload a new version in a few days (maybe tomorrow) - it takes about 40 minutes to render. Thanks again for the suggestions!

I have this image of a mad scientist's lab - this was the image (with very minor differences) in the recent < BG Blitz >. Unfortunately, the mad scientist is only a white chalk outline on the floor, but his soul still wants to learn some opinions as to how to improve on it.



It was modeled in Rhino and rendered with Flamingo. Thanks to Slava and yarooze for their Russian assistance.

I normally don't link to my own messages (I'm not that important   ), but I think everyone deserves to get a fair warning about this book/movie, so here it is:

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=26642.msg337361#msg337361

Please ignore the developing flame-war on the target page, when I wrote my entry I didn't realize the thread is going to be closed.

Also note, that I'm not religious, so the church is NOT the reason I disliked the book. It's simply a bad story (really, no comprehensible story at all.) BTW, I thought the Gabriel Knight game "Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned" turned out pretty bad, too, especially after a promising start. I think it's waaay the worst of the 3 GK games (I loved the first two.)

The problem with the DVC is that it is written as a bad video-clip: short, exciting-looking chapters, where all kinds of things happen, always without a reason. It WAS interesting to read it at first, because I was intrigued, so I kept reading it, thinking that eventually every story-thread will come together and be explained later. Then suddenly there were no more pages left and still nothing happened.

I think the only reason the book became a bestseller, was because of the hysteric marketing around it, which I got lured into.

With this, I rest my case, it's up to you guys if you pay for it or not.

For those who haven't yet read the book:

It's a horrible, horrible, boring and dumb book. It seems to be exciting and adventorous, but when you reach the end, you'll realize that there is actually no story at all. Dan Brown may be good at marketing the trash that he churns out, but he doesn't know how to write a decent sentence, let alone a book.

Unfortunately for me, there wasn't anyone to warn me, so I bought that trash and read it. I won't watch the movie (I already read some pre-screening reviews that people are coming out of the screening rooms running), because I cannot imagine that anyone could possibly make anything even remotely interesting out of such crap.

I'm sure it'll make a lot of money - many people don't give a damn about a good story - but none of it will come from me.

You've been warned, save your money and time. 

Thanks to all who voted for my work.

Please wait a few hours for me to get home and be able to upload my entry. It's done but I didn't have time to upload it in the morning. I don't have it on my office computer. :/

Thank you very much for waiting, everyone. Here is my entry: the mad scientist's lab in a secret basement. Unfortunately, the mad scientist is now only a white chalk outline on the floor and no one knows what that machine does in the back... except maybe one person.

Look out for evidence.



640x480, true color. It took me quite a bit of work, I'm glad it's done. Thanks to Slava for the Russian translation!