Software

Shadowrun Promo - A Blast From the Past

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Talk about a blast from the past. I recently came across a copy of FASA's 1990 Shadowrun Promo video. I never realized that FASA had ever done anything like this. In some ways it is much better than the current WotC ads for the "Red Box".

It features everything I'd expect from Shadowrun, and all with that old school late 80s amateur look to the sets. I was impressed by the fact that they actually did have some 3D animation in the video, but, as expected, it was very low polygons (just a few boxes with very few textures or shaders to their surfaces).

Savage Worlds Probability Trait and Wild Die the same

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An interesting idea was brought up on the Savage Worlds forum about the possibility of adjusting the system so that instead of wild card characters rolling a d6 as the wild die, what if the wild die was the same as the trait die being rolled. This got me thinking, and since I'd already done up the chart and tables for rolling the normal way, how hard could this be.
Turns out, not hard at all. About 15 minutes with excel and voila, here is the chart.

D6 Probabilities with the Wild Die

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So, this problem keeps coming up again and again in various forums dealing with the loved and, for the most part, forgotten system from West End Games, D6 System. The problem is the presence of the "Wild Die" that was introduced in Star Wars 2nd Edition. As usual, there isn't a whole lot of grey space in this debate... or shall we more accurately say "Love/Hate".

I created a small perl script that takes in the number of iterations and the number of dice that are part of the roll and outputs the list of target numbers that were rolled, how many times they were rolled and what % of the rolls do they represent. The script takes into account the result of the Wild Die. I settled on 1,000,000 iterations as it seemed to give a consistent sample response when run several times.

Dancing Antibody

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I've been playing around on occasion with 3D animation software, specifically Lightwave 3D for a bit of time, but haven't really spent the time needed to really learn to use the software and get good at it. So, I was playing around with it a bit over the last few months and created an amusing little test animation of an Antibody doing the Can-Can. It's basically three capsules merged at the joint (each one was positioned 120 degrees apart). I created the eyes with a globe and then boolean removed them from the "head" area so they are recessed in a nook designed for them. Bones were then extended from the center out into each capsule to create the knees and neck. The collar (which isn't very visible in this animation) was wrapped around the upper capsule and then spikes were cloned around it. I keep meaning to go back in and extend the length of the animation but haven't yet found the time to do so.

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