====== OGRE Digest, Aug 18th, 2003 (Last: Aug 11th) ======== ===== Flying Ogres From: stephan beal ===== Making print quality maps From: Ville Tirronen ===== Anti-Grav From: "Herb Diehr" ===== Don't yield, back SHIELD. From: "Chris French" ===== Bringing Back The Minis From: Andrew Walters ============================== From: stephan beal Subject: Flying Ogres > From: "Chris French" > Subject: Twenty Bucks ... > Oh, you mean the "Jet Airplanes" with maximum speeds of around > 80 MPH? [rolls eyes] Didn't Costikyan bother to look at the map > and time scales when he wrote that? > > Course, this *is* the same guy who called _OGRE_ "The ideal > game to play whilst stoned".... LOL! i never made the connection that that was the same dude. His quote has always stayed with me, though, and i mutter it to players when i introduce them to the game. SJ mentions it somewhere in the Ogre book and/or the web site... > > From: Sethkimmel@aol.com > > Subject: Tank Power ... > >As far as > > Europe falling apart, I seriously doubt it. For one, they are > > socialists which means that nobody goes hungry nor is anybody > > really that poor. It could also be said that we're equally poor. In Germany, for example, the average *household* income is around 32k Euros/year net. Not bad, but not great. My gross salary, after taxes, insurance and whatnot, is 51% of my net (whereas in the States it was around 67%). Also, rent prices, at least in this part of the country (Munich), compare well with those in the San Francisco area. ============================== From: Ville Tirronen Subject: Making print quality maps I have made a small software that renders acceptable quality high colour hexagonal maps. These are quite suitable for playing gev on them. (among various other games) Features: * Plains, forests, cities, seas, swamps, roads and rivers supported. * Optional resolution. Using Povray as backend, you can render the maps as high resolution as you want. You could, with some time and lot of computer memory render maps for macrotures if you wished. (And they still wouldn't be pixelated when printed) * Procedural texturing of all terrain. No single bitmap or copyrighted image used. * Maps can designed semi-easily with an ordinary text editor. No need to hassle with coordinates. Recommend VIM especially. Example map can be found at http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~aleator/tst.png (Note that the topmost row of hexes is redundant), and screenshot of editing it is at http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~aleator/editing.png Is there interest for such hack? Enough to warrant me to spend further another week to improve it? ============================== From: "Herb Diehr" Subject: Anti-Grav I think I was too optomistic with the tech...! I was thinking of the hover-truck and geting carried away. Need to play more...! Herb Diehr The Unabashed OGRE-Minded ============================== From: "Chris French" Subject: Don't yield, back SHIELD. From: "Henry J. Cobb" > [That's why I figure the Ogre Magi aren't jet fighters. They're > hoverplatforms like SHIELD's heli-carrier. Umm -- WTF is "SHIELD"? > They cost a lot less and it's > not worthwhile to go faster than they can dodge anyway, with all those > pesky lasers around. Y'know, it's a good thing you've never met Mike Garrity. One of the first things he pointed out to me about his _Car Wars_-spec OGRE was that, according to the _CW Tanks_ rules, OGREs are effectively immune to lasers. (Specifically, Laminate AFV armor takes 1/10 damage from lasers.) So all those Laser Towers are so much expensive decoration. And _CW_'s tech level is at least 1 less than the OGREverse's, so it's not as if the OGREverse couldn't develop laser-proof BPC.... > As for plasma power. The power of the sun is not focused to a point, > like the thermonuclear shaped charge on an Ogre missile. -HJC] It doesn't have to be -- the power of the Sun will fry anything within about 50 miles (or more). And the plasma bolts in Drake's universe are quite concentrated (in one story, a tank's cupola tri- barrel shoots down a spy satellite...). So it's reasonable to assume that the weapons of each universe are approximately the same. That said, the Heavy Water Soap Bubbles Hammer uses will wipe out any force the Combine or Paneurope cared to field. Hmm -- David Drake once wrote a _Car Wars_ novel; maybe we can convince him to write a _HS_/_O_ crossover.... :) CF ===== [For SHIELD search for Nick Fury on Google. As for the lasers, I always thought they were non-visible light. Like say gamma rays. http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994049 -HJC] ============================== From: Andrew Walters Subject: Bringing Back The Minis So I was trying to figure out how we could distract Steve Jackson so he doesn't kill off Ogre by publishing it again in a couple of years, and I was thinking we could get him into publishing role playing games or collectible card games or something, and then it hit me... ... how to bring the Ogre minis back and make them so popular Steve would get over his loathing of Ogre and just rake in the bucks: We make them collectible. I hear collectible minis are the future. I mean, I thought I was collecting Ogre minis, what with keeping an inventory, deciding how many of each I needed and slowly building my ultimate set. No, apparently "collecting" means buying things randomly packed on another continent and getting a bunch of things you don't want. I should have looked it up in the dictionary instead of assuming. Lazy me. Anyway, rumor has it the clicky-base is carefully guarded by a frothing band of sunlight-fearing lawyers who will sue you sterile if you so much as make a mini with a round base, but we could make the bases *square*. When I was ten I had a tape recorder with a volume control dial with numbers on the exposed edge, we could use that mechanism. Of course, we'd need more than the dozen armor units we have now, but that's no problem. Looking at discussions on the various Ogre lists for the last six years, it looks like we have about nine hundred, most of which Henry disagrees with the point value of. That includes one, two and three squad bases of six hundred types of infantry. We could make the regular ones common and the stupid ones really rare; that way we can trade them to clueless youngster who will trade any number of commons for a "rare" and build our sets quicker. Paul just ships the molds to some country without the emancipation proclamation and the models come back with the gentle warp of a comfortable tennis shoe. The painting is good these days, though. Better than mine anyway. And we would no longer have to take time to paint! Each box can have a couple of infantry bases, a couple of armor units, and a CP, structure, or Ogre. Then we just modify the rules so that it takes a savant to memorize them and an idiot to want to play them (a blue *circle* on movement means that it gets the road bonus over water, a blue *square* on movement means it can only be attacked by Ogre missiles and Marines, which have the blue *triangles* on range). I suppose the Ogres could have multiple dials, too. Anyway, my email program is showing me three chili peppers for potentially offensive language in this email, so I better quit. I'll leave it to you geniuses to work out the rest. Andrew ===== [I think I just failed a SAN check here, but isn't what's needed a rule set that actually uses the minis and is less than a decade old? -HJC] ============================== Send all submissions or mailing list changes or problems to ogre@sjgames.com Archives for this mailing list may be found at http://www.io.com/~hcobb/ General online support for the OGRE game is at http://www.sjgames.com/ogre Ogre, G.E.V., Shockwave and other products mentioned here are trademarks or registered trademarks of Steve Jackson Games. All rights are reserved by SJ Games. This material is used here in accordance with the SJ Games online policy at http://www.sjgames.com/general/online_policy.html