I can't train my Looks

That's true for some aspects (facial structure, bone-layout, etc... no plastic surgery in medieval times), but unless you have a severe medical condition you can indeed train your looks, in multiple ways.  The most obvious would be weight control and muscle mass.  But there are more subtle areas too, such as fashion, posture, facial expressions, makeup, tan, bruises, scars, hairstyle, etc.  Those all take skill to handle properly.

--> Linux
'course, that's not a game.  To most people anyways.

Were I contributing art, I wouldn't mind the license too much.  Because it would be art that I made for PS.  So long as nobody starts claiming they made my art, big deal.

I can see DigiEvolve's side.  He wants to make art that anybody can use.  That doesn't fly here, so he was polite about it and went his own way.  The PS team didn't do him an injustice.  They just don't accept that type of art.  I don't blame them:  Games should be unique.  Aside from which, there is plenty of free art on the web for people who just want placeholders or generic stuff to try their hand at making a game with.  Then when they get to the point where they know what their doing, they can get better art.  There's no reason they have to use PS's art.

If PS is doing an injustice using closed art, than K.A. Applegate is doing an injustice by not letting me use Animorphs #23 in the middle of my hypothetical novel.  And it isn't an injustice to the artists who can no longer use their work elsewhere:  They volunteered to do this, and knew what they were getting into.  Besides, they're artists.  They can make new art if they need it.  (Yes, I know that doesn't help if there's a sentimental attachment...)


Besides, ownership is an issue that occurs in many other areas too, and much worse:  If I happen to invent something while I'm a student at my university, depending on how much university help I had (which could be pretty subjective) it automatically gets split between myself and the uni, simply because they provided the lab, or fed me, or whatever else the lawyer wants to claim was a significant contribution...  Similar things happen with companies.


EDIT:  Don't think of it as PS not sharing its art.  Think of it as PS not accepting art that is being shared.  They don't want to just use stock images and clipart that's being used accross the web.  They want their own unique stuff.

EDIT 2:

I know programmers have had loner to digest these new ideas and i know artists are still stuck in the old world with acceptable but disruptive licenses that prevent people from sharing and creating and the project from befitting from those creations.

I'm both a programmer (mostly Linux) and an artist.  Art and code are not the same thing.  Similar in ways (both art forms, for example), but different.  Few artists would use another artist's work like programmers do, other than as some kind of extreme alteration to make an effect (turning the Mona Lisa into a cyborg, for example), and then only with permission if the artist is alive (unless it's an attack on the artist).  But I could never bring myself to say, use a Klyros in my own game.  I could do it as a place-holder, sure.  I did that with Pokemon sprites before too.  And scribbled smily faces.  But never for the finished product, nor even something intended to be seen by more than twelve people or so.

I was looking for a free online game for linux.  I don't remember if Google turned up Planeshift directly or if I saw it linked from elsewhere, but it turns up in both places pretty easily.

What made me take the time to download and try it was reading the backstory.  After that, I was hooked.  I haven't played as much as I'd like, but I've been keeping my eye on it ever since.

And the lack of morons didn't really draw me in, but since there weren't any around, they weren't able to drive me away.


As for bringing in more people, I have no idea.

Female Klyros, or else one of the races that doesn't have any models.

I mentioned nuclear power above, but I meant that it was being harnessed by intelligent (or at least human-level) life, as in it was not natural.  I was not then aware of naturally occurring fission reactors:
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor

The natural nuclear reactor formed when a uranium-rich mineral deposit became inundated with groundwater that acted as a neutron moderator, and a strong chain reaction took place. The water moderator would boil away as the reaction increased, slowing it back down again and preventing a meltdown. The fission reaction was sustained for hundreds of thousands of years.

Incidentally, I have absolutely no idea how I stumbled across that.  On a whim I had switched my Firefox search bar to Wikipedia mode and typed in "cat people".  Several hours later I was still in Wiki-land, but reading about the Tsar-Bomb and naturally occurring nuclear fission.  Behold, the power of cross-references

EDIT:  And it turns out that potty-training a cat is actually possible.  I'd always assumed it was just a joke.  Go figure.

Some people also wind up talking to their jewelry, but that's mainly in more isolated cases.

A thing that's easy to forget:  Light might be the main source of energy on the surface of Earth, but it's not the only source of energy on Earth, and definitely not the only one on Yliakum's world.  Other potential sources:
Geothermal (if I remember right, between two to five miles down on Earth is hot enough to boil water!)
Magma (technically it's part of geothermal, but magma specifically can provide light too)
Radiation (could be harnessed directly I'm sure, but it can also heat stone and water, or cause certain substances to emit light)
Hydro (underground rivers, waterfalls, tides, currents, etc)
Magic (but I don't know enough about PS's specific version of magic to give good examples)
Chemical (for example, if some form of plant or creature could consume coal or oil, or if Kran-like creatures could metabolize more rock-like substances)
Wind (if there's a very long tunnel or large area, heat differences could cause this)
Fusion/Fission (Not natural and seemingly unlikely, but who knows what inhabits the depths?  As far as I'm aware, even Talad and Laanx haven't been to the other side of the planet.  For all we know, there might be a technologically advanced race of mole men out there with fusion power plants).

There are other sources too, but I don't know enough physics to know much about them (for example, if the planet has a magnetic field, chances are that field is going to be constantly experiencing slight changes.  How much energy is available and how it would be harnessed, I know not.  And then there's tectonic movements, tidal effects from the sun, moon(s), and other planets, pressure differences, planetary rotation, etc.)


Sure, some of these might seem a little unlikely, but think about it:  Plants can absorb sunlight and convert it into energy.  Human skin can use sunlight to help produce vitamin-D.  If you stop to think about it, that's no less "out there" than anything I mentioned.

Science all the way   I want to know more about magic, meteorology, anatomy, geology, etc.

For the values of the coins, my guess is to simplify things.  I think the idea was to optimize between having a small number of different coins and a wide range of possible values.  You have to remember, this is a medieval time period, which means no fancy minting factories where they can just churn stuff out by the millions.  So the fewer different types of coins they have to produce, the less work it takes and the cheaper it becomes to produce the money, meaning more budget for other things, like extra cheesecake at important government meetings.  So, they skipped some of the intermediates, like 5 and 25.

As for the shape, it would be nice if that was relevant, but it doesn't have to be.  Also, I wouldn't be surprised if it used to be relevant at one time, but if the numeric values have been adjusted over the years to what they are now, probably either due to some revolution (like in the real world with the French Revolution and Metric), or in attempts to combine the monetary systems that each race brought with them into something that all races would find acceptable.

If the amount of coins is kept at a certain level("repair broken coins and replace the ones that leave the city or get lost somehow" I don't see mining new ones here) how come coins are not getting rarer and rarer, since there are more and more people.

My assumption is that the level is actually a ratio of coins per person.  So more people equals more coins overall, but same ratio, thus same value.

Now, if we take into account that the population isn't increasing, the number will actually remain the same.  If this went on for many years, people would just take it for granted that there are X coins floating around.  If there were a big disaster though, they'd either realize that the total number will have to start adjusting again, or experience inflation.

EDIT:  I should clarify something:  Yes, more players enter the city every so often, but that doesn't mean it's growing.  Just that more of the population consists of us.  But until the number of human players summed with the number of NPCs is greater than the population of the town, it's irrelevant.  When we reach that point, then it will be growing.  But remember, Hydlaa is bigger than it seems.  It's not fully implemented.  By the time we have that many people, there will be plenty of other towns out there and people will be spawning all over Yliakum.

As for overpopulation, don't forget these are medieval times.  That means:
A.  People have shorter lifespans
B.  Children have much much lower survival rates than now, especially babies
C.  Successful births are also going to be less frequent (no modern hospitals and such; most babies will be delivered by the father, a family member, or a midwife)
D.  Potentially a more conservative view of getting jiggy with it, possibly fueled by the lack of birth control.  This could be countered by the larger families in older times, but that generally only applies to people in the country (Bigger family == more hands to till fields.  But in the city, your income won't increase as much from having kids).

Not that overpopulation can't happen in medieval periods.  As I understand it, overpopulation was a big factor in making the black plague as nasty as it was.  But, that was probably over a thousand years after humans started settling in Europe.  Yliakum, on the other hand, is only ~750 year old, if I remember correctly.


For weather, I've wondered this also.  I wrote up how I figured it could happen a year or so ago, so I won't repeat it.  Search would probably turn it up.  I don't know how realistic my version was though, I'm no meteorologist.