masteff

The alien spaceships and the cinematography remind me of District 9. And my first thought was: this will be the "War of the Worlds" that Tom Cruise should have made.

Geez, Gogo, you had worried at first that my girlfriend had been talking about me again! Hadn't seen the full trailer (just a teaser before now)... this looks good. Can't wait for them to finally get all the Avengers introduced and have a good joint movie.

From Wikipedia on the info below: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Los_Angeles From the entertainment section of my local paper: An alien invasion? Maybe in L.A. by: MICHAEL SMITH World Scene Writer Thursday, February 24, 2011 The alien-invasion movie "Battle: Los Angeles" opens in Tulsa theaters on March 11, and -- believe it or not -- it is inspired by real events that took place during World War II. Friday, Feb. 25, is the 69th anniversary of a 1942 event that found a series of unidentified flying objects in the sky above the Los Angeles-area coastline, according to newspaper reports. Just months removed from Pearl Harbor, air raids sirens were sounded, a blackout was ordered and military forces fired about 1,400 anti-aircraft shells at the object or objects, believed to be Japanese aircraft, but without success. Or did they down a craft, UFO theorists have speculated, and not tell the public the truth about what they found? The mystery remains to this day, inspiring filmmakers to take the next logical step.

Looks totally interesting!

Schot - where's that thread you posted once discussing the rubber band trick for SB building? (sorry, I'm at work, will try to find later if you don't post first) Voidstriker - I'll try to find you a couple good threads from the SIF this evening. We had a few decent discussions about it there. I hate to admit I'm starting to forget some of the finer details about S1. I can confirm that in S1, the one and only thing that adds SB is to be "in combat" (meaning your orange circle is on). The best way to stay "in combat" is to equip a ranged weapon as much as possible (longer range means "in combat" more). See my post #22 in this thread for an easy place to build SB: http://forum.sacred2.com/showthread.php?t=38829

My suggestion is get yourself a decent Seagate or WD (1TB drives are going for $70-80). While you have your system open, use a can of compressed air and blast out all the bunnies. Send the current drive in under warranty and then use it as a secondary drive once it's back (might make a good option for your page file or your browser cache). Oh, is your current drive size still in active production? I returned a drive for buddy and he got a freebie upgrade from 200MB to 250MB because that's what they had in stock. (Also, the drive you get back might very well not be the drive you send it; but it will be freshly refurbed and generally have a revised warranty period on it. I can say nothing but good things about Seagate's warranty program.) This might also be a time to review your cooling fans. Are they making any noise they shouldn't? Easy to add a fan or two to your order for just a small increase in shipping cost. (Or specifially search for items w/ free shipping on Newegg like I do )

I'll have to keep that router in mind... when my roommate moved out, I inherited a fairly new Buffalo but it seems to drop out at least once every couple of days (which means an annoyed trip to the other end of the house to toggle the power on the router).

The direct link first gave a 404 error but I refreshed and then it showed... go figure!

Curious... the pic is displayed for me in Chrome but not IE.

I concede. You have indeed found the root person/god. From wikipedia on Guan Yu: "where his name may be given with various Anglicized spellings, including Kwan Dai, Kwan Tai, Kuan Ti, Kuan Kung, Wu Ti, Mo Dai, Guan Di, Kuan Yu, Kwan Yu, or Quan Yu"

I think this is your most likely candidate for Kuan. "Kuan Kung, also known as Kuan Ti, is the Chinese god of war." http://www.fengshuicrazy.com/business-wealth/kuan-kung-the-god-of-war.php "To the Taoists and others, Kuan Ti was their God of War while the Buddhists confer upon him the great honour as their Protector." http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/history/kuanti-txt.htm "He was a war god, who also protected people from evil demons" http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/china/religion/kuanti.htm

Perhaps we need to ask what browsers people are using also. I do see "other recipients" in the Darkness skin using IE7 and Chrome9.

I never liked doing quicksave/quickload to try for set drops because you don't make any progress for all the time spent (and I'd always mess up which key I hit and either ruin my quicksave (by saving over it) or hit quickload right after something good dropped and it'd vanish). Of course it's not much different than the bajillion hours I spent at BraveMart flipping back and forth and making no real progress. Personally, I'd say spend time in combat to boost your SB and fight champs. But that really is just personal preference. Set drops are hard to quantify so no idea what's actually more effective between quest drops and champs.

You can't open a save file from outside Sacred (it's not like an excel or adobe file where clicking it will launch the proper program). And it's not the "quicksave" you're seeing but an autosave. As wolfie said above, go into the load game menu and scroll down thru the various saves. You will likely have lost some progress because autosave only happens at certain milestones but it's better than losing it altogether. Your other alternative is to figure out the location and filename of the "quicksave" and then replace it w/ the file you're seeing (but no promise that will work as I've never tried it myself).

Thanks Gogo! I remember how much fun a group of us from the DM forum had playing Ikariam for awhile so thought peeps here might find this one interesting if they do FB games at all. Yes, at least two have started up (but no functionality in-game yet to support them). Members of their forum can go under "Community" and see the "Groups" listing where groups can have an info page and members can have discussion threads. Might be a good place for DM to have a listing. http://forums.casualcollective.com/

On the move on the world map In combat against AI ships (better in full screen mode but couldn't quickly figure out how to grab the screen shot in full screen) Victory (show how many resources I won)

Finally, a Facebook game that doesn't entail tons of silly repetitive tasks that result in nothing (how long did it take you to realize that FarmClone is nothing like farming?). http://apps.facebook.com/battlepirates/ First off, these are modern day pirates, not Jack Sparrow. I'll start w/ the disclaimer that at this moment certain features are still in development (namely the attacking of other players' bases). And this game is very much in beta so the changes made in updates can be pretty dramatic (last night's update cut the number of mines in half and downgraded most of them). So consider yourself forewarned. So what's good about Battle Pirates? One of my dislikes about Ikariam was the lack of animation. Combat was simply a static display of results. Well, Battle Pirates changes that. It's programmed in Flash and both movement on the world map and actual combat (well, sea-based combat since we haven't seen how attacking of bases will work) is animated AND player controllable. Yes, you read that right... you control your fleet in real time and can maneuver your ships during battle for strategic effect. You start w/ a small island and build various buildings (e.g., a wind station for energy, a shipyard for constructing ships, a weapons lab to research new and upgraded weapons, etc). You can get all the resources you need without leaving your island or you can hit the sea and try to gain them from mines, from fighting AI ships or from attacking other players (most typically while they're at a mine). They just added the ability to send mercenary fleets to your Facebook friends so I don't know how those work yet. Another good thing is that you don't permanently lose ships in combat. They're out of commission after they lose all their armor points and must return to base for repair before they can fight again (but they still count towards your fleet's cargo capacity so you don't lose plunder). This is balanced by the fact that bigger ships require more resources to build, have significantly longer build times and take significantly longer to repair. But at least you're not constantly rebuilding that "perfect" fleet (repairs only cost time, new ships cost both resources and time). Now, considering it has realtime movement, one serious feature is lacking... the ability to chase down an enemy. As long as an enemy is moving at the time your ship arrives at their location, no combat occurs. Of course this does allow lower strength players to evade yet another whooping from a bully neighbor. I'll attach some screen shots and more commentary on game features later.

In case anyone's missing the tunes from Sacred 1.... http://www.last.fm/music/Ascaron+Entertainment/Sacred+Soundtrack

Er.. Which dog...? There's 2 of them in Sloeford. One's a Rottweiler and the other's a German Shepard Dog. The shepard is near the tavern where you meet Michael the apprentice Blacksmith, while the rottie hangs out on the other side of town where you pick up the quest Tutorial Hirelings. So to reask Gogo's question, have you followed either of them?

Loco wins! I had to do some internet digging to figure out it's "The Proposition" w/ Guy Pearce and John Hurt. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0421238/ (I'd have sworn the guy on the right was Anthony Hopkins, so I was way off track on that one!) Look at post 159, I answered the easy one. Lord of the North, I sincerely apologize for making you feel left out for only applauding Loco on the last one. Yes, you correctly answered the easy one. The prize for answering is posting the next batch of pics and as no one else has jumped in yet, I'm sure we all would enjoy your taking a hand at stumping us with some movie photos. Again, I apologize.

Loco wins! I had to do some internet digging to figure out it's "The Proposition" w/ Guy Pearce and John Hurt. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0421238/ (I'd have sworn the guy on the right was Anthony Hopkins, so I was way off track on that one!)

Here's the Fortress one (one shot for location and other for inscription): I do notice that it's called a "Festive Grave" and not just a grave.

I'll just warn you now... there are at least a few graves not in graveyards. IIRC, there's one inside the walls of Fortress Reikenstein in the human area. I'd really suggest talking to JonnyX to see if he'd share (if he still has it) http://clan-da.com/showthread.php?t=7747

You could just have fun runnin' around looking for soccer balls and accept any quest you see but not actually do it... this would at least let you fill in more (red) quest names so at least the areas that don't have any listed would look like they're at least being worked on.

Seriously:) Learn to have a sense of humor.