Some time back, I had an interest in writing a story (yes, I promise I will get to the point somewhere in this post).  I wanted this story to be completely alien, but only to the reader.  I wanted the characters in the story to act and think that the world (if you can call it that) they existed in was the norm.  No paragraphs explaining how things work here, nothing to tell the reader \"oh, ignore the problems you see with this, because it\'s all different in my creation.\"

But now, you\'ve suggested doing something like this.  It is no longer an original idea.  How can it be true fantasy if you and I and, to be honest, many other people have already come up with it?  How can we expect to have true fantasy when people (at least, some of them), are by their very natures, creative?

Some might argue that *anything* we can think up is a product of society and our life experiences.  If this is the case, then how can anything be imaginative?  If this is true, then everything that we think is in some way shaped by what we observe or have previously observed.  If this is not the case, then what shapes our creations?  Are we actually capable of spontaneous creative ideas?

Thoughts would be appreciated.

Originally posted by Ineluke
We don\'t flame people who take the time to make insightful posts here Null_void.  That was a good post humbly stating your own opinion so you aren\'t in any danger whatsoever. I haven\'t seen any of your other posts yet but from this one you seem to be a person who will fit in well here.

Welcome to the planeshift message boards!

Thank you.    I\'ve been read more than I post, as I usually can\'t think of anything useful to say that hasn\'t been said already.  I find the game quite enjoyable and would like to contribute, though I figure it would be a good idea to acutally look through the source some to make sure I can handle it first.

I\'ve been quite impressed by the friendliness of the folks around here, in my rather limited stay so far (since October last year or so, for the game.  A bit later for the boards, I believe).  So a big \"thanks\" to all the people who make this a good place to be.

You know, as much as I should probably keep my mouth shut...

I\'ve never really liked the game mechanics of D&D.  I\'d certainly agree that a good DM and players can make any system enjoyable (after all, these games are supposed to be about RP, not rules, right?), I just always preferred systems like EarthDawn or ShadowRun.  I don\'t suppose anyone\'s played these?  

Anyway, I\'ve heard GURPS is a good... uh... whatever it is that GURPS is considered.  Mage (or heck, anything by White Wolf) is interesting to me, from a creativity point of view.  I take it D&D is the favorite around here as far as pencil and paper goes?

I guess this is a potential flame war subject, but I\'m just curious.  Anyway, time to go prepare for my ShadowRun session tonight.    Plot suggestions would be appreciated as well.

Null_Void
(Karrash)

Um... someone that I can discuss stuff with.  As unsophisticated as that sounds... I sometimes like to get into philosophical discussions.  I prefer someone who can talk back and seem reasonable enough to make me consider their point of view.

The thing is, one can do that with a friend, so... I guess that\'s not so much a prerequisite for a girlfriend.  Seriously, I think I\'d have a hard time \"hooking up\" with someone who wasn\'t already a good friend.  I mean, maybe that\'ll happen (if I get desperate enough), but... I don\'t forsee it at any point in the near future.  Of course, then you run into the problem of possibly losing a good friend if the relationship goes sour.

As for the physical aspect... I have to say that the first thing that popped into my mind was \"hair smell.\"  I don\'t know why.  For some reason, that just attracts me to a person.  And it\'s more a function of the shampoo they use than some natural aspect of their appearance.  There are other things as well, but I\'m not sure I could vocalize them properly.

Anyway.  Internet relationships:  I\'m all for them, but I feel that to really know someone I have to be able to meet them face-to-face from time to time.  Oh well.  That\'s not going to happen any time soon.  

Did anyone else have to get a newer flex.skn file in order to get this to build?  Might wanna try that if you\'re having trouble building aws.so, maybe?  Not that I\'m a good one to try to give advice.

Okay, I am determined to get this to work.  I\'ve been going about this in a strange way, and it\'s probably not correct.  But I\'ve got bits and pieces working for now.

I was having the same trouble with the pre-compiled binaries, so I grabbed the latest big source package.  The build got stuck on the aws plugin and wouldn\'t finish.  I believe flex could not properly parse some input file... sllex or something to that effect.  I didn\'t remember enough about creating parsers to fix it myself.

So I got the latest source tarball for CS and compiled it.  CS itself worked great, but cel would not compile using anything above 0.96-001.

So, I went and grabbed the original 0.96-001 tarball.  That compiled, but there were two problems.  First, it didn\'t link stuff correctly.  I had to change line 87 of CS/libs/cssys/unix/unix.mak from

LFLAGS.DLL = -Wl, -shared Wl, -soname Wl,$@
or whatever it was, to
LFLAGS.DLL = -shared Wl, -soname Wl,$@

I can\'t take credit for that... someone posted it on a mandrake board.

The other problem I was having was that it was not properly detecting my png library or some of my gl libraries, and thus, not building them the appropriate plugins.  I copied over the configure stuff and the whole mk directory from the \'official source package\' and re-ran configure.  It seemed to work.  After compiling, the blocks test program worked.  I don\'t know if this is what one is \'supposed\' to do, but it seems to have worked for now.

Anyway, next, cel.  The cel that was bundled with the source package would no longer compile, so I downloaded the version of cel that was originally released to work with 0.96-001.  It compiled!

Now, I just need to get the planeshift client itself to compile...

The reason I\'m posting this, is so that anyone who knows that any of the stuff I\'ve tried may break things down the road can tell me so I can give up now.    Looks like a neat game, I\'d really like to play it.