u/The_MadMage_Halaster — reddlx

How do my moods look?

After some work I think I've created what I think are a good set of moods.

Indicative
Expresses a real event, past, present, or future. Unmarked.

Declarative
Affirms the action being preformed as truthful, usually in response to a question. Also sometimes used as an ad-hock past tense (and evolves into a full past tense in some daughter languages).

Inferential
Expresses doubt or unsureity about the action being preformed. Very often used when reporting what someone else said.

Imperative/Hortative
Used for issuing direct commands, or as a Hortative. Eg: ratatiu! "Let's run!"

Potential/Jussive
Expresses the ability to preform an action, or the permission to preform an action. Essentially, giving permission by saying "they can run" is stating the fact that they can, indeed, run.

Necessitative
Used to indicate something that must occur, as well as express societal obligations and commands. Eg: "Thou shalt not murder" etc...

Hypothetical
Describes an action that could occur. Often combined with the Conditional in if/then statements.

Conditional
Indicates conditions or counterfactual. Eg: "If they would run..", "they would run, if...", or "they would have run, if not for..." with the hypothetical used for the other half of the statement. Very context sensitive. (Still working out the kinks for this one).

Optative/Prescriptive
Also called the volitative, this indicates something the speaker wishes should come to pass, as well as to give non-direct commands. Eg: "I would like you to make me a pie."

Admonitive
Inverse of the optative/prescriptive, this indicates something the speaker doesn't wish to come to pass, or fears occurring.

So what do you think? The language is loosely based on a mix of Nahuatl, Otomi, and a bit of Classical Latin (I don't like taking from just one linguistic area). Verbs take the most influence from Nahuatl, hence the presence of the very rare Admonitive mood.

u/The_MadMage_Halaster — 3 days ago

▲ 28 r/rct

First Time Playing: Dynamite Dunes

Here we are again, another park down. Dynamite dunes was definitely fun, I'm always a fan of desert levels.

Now that I've got the basics down, I've been having a lot more fun with custom coaster design. I liked snaking the tracks up and down the dunes, creating big shapes in the sky. I'm particularly proud of the three coasters on what I've nicknamed "Vomit Mountain." They were all a blast to design, particularly the Looping Coaster (though the Mini Coaster next to it has almost double the income; it's a beast). I tried to the design the park as one big loop, with mini-loops branching out from it to keep the guests flowing.

For this map I went with something of a loose time travel approach. You start in the Adventure Outpost, a cluster of wooden buildings and rides obviously inspired by Adventureland, and the general pulp explorer aesthetic. Then you go back in time, encountering Roman ruins in the form of a themed Wooden Coaster and Log Flume. Then, past the Roman ruins, lies the ruins of Ancient Egypt. I had a lot of fun theming this park, if you can't tell.

I got a little board near the end, since I was mostly just waiting for the scenario to end; before I realized that this map had building rights. I only got to building the little Avenue of Sphinxes and the Mini Coaster there near the end, and didn't have enough time to develop the big hill. Ah well, I'll make sure to check what land I could buy at the start of the scenario next time.

Overall, I had a blast with Dynamite Dunes. Leafy Lake up next, see you then!

Park Download: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/vt29tkeko75fyflstjtg6/Dynamite-Dunes-1-Victory.park?rlkey=kny6q8ld7mk8h1x5j2l8ualme&st=vv392tpy&dl=0

u/The_MadMage_Halaster — 11 days ago

▲ 44 r/rct

First Time Playing Forest Frontiers! How Did I Do?

This is the result of my first time playing Forest Frontiers (on OpenRCT2). I did this all in one evening, and decided that rather than wait until tomorrow to touch it up, it would be natural to call it finished when I felt like going to bed. I would have liked to add some more scenery, especially near the wooden coaster in the back, but overall I think it's nice. The theming is a bit all over the place, veering wildly from "casual floral amusement park" to "TRON goes camping," because I was practicing using various kinds of scenery.

My takeaway from this playthrough was getting better at making things compact. If you saw my earlier post a few days ago, I decided to play Electric Fields first because it was larger, since I was initially turned off by the small size of Forest Frontiers. However, now that I've played it and had to work with it's constraints, I've definitely gotten better at keeping things compact and using space efficiently. Such as interweaving tracks of multiple rides together, and generally just using all the space I can. Mostly...

I have also learned that the Suspended Swinging Coaster sucks big fat gorilla- ahem. It's not that good, and is a pain in the A to work with (hence why I named the finished coaster "Pain in My A"). I shan't work with it again.

Included are two saves, one for the park as it was when I completed the objective, and then the park as it is in the above screenshot. Compare the two as thou wilt.

Objective Complete: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/dezs8enn9x2lefsk8qmzp/Forest-Frontiers-2-Victory.park?rlkey=r4lw2zlh4xr99bl48xjpp4q5v&st=9n14nkzc&dl=0

Final Park: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/uwo39hm2eiuqxmjozy5q9/Forest-Frontiers-2-Freeplay.park?rlkey=e3gsc1okk9fvqw1g3b6304864&st=a098cwpn&dl=0

From here I think I'll go through the scenario list for RCT1, and see where that takes me. Wish me luck!

u/The_MadMage_Halaster — 12 days ago

▲ 20 r/rct

I just finished my first scenario/park above (on OpenRCT2), and was wondering if I could get some feedback on how I did. Unfortunately I didn't have this idea until after I freeplayed a bit, and my autosaves don't go far back enough to preserve the park at the moment the scenario was completed. So I decided to present it as it is a year or so after finishing the scenario.

I'm just looking for some general feedback, though I'm unaware of the general protocol when it comes to this, so I hope I'm asking for it correctly.

I watched a few tutorials before playing, so I didn't go into this completely blind, but I am definitely inexperienced. I was just wondering if there's anything I may have missed, or any general design comments you might have for the park.

Dropbox Link for Save: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/bfpfmet42mw340r8mdjj3/Electric-Fields-1.park?rlkey=e82znotfn0m2acdumx7qqmbrk&st=p6jvuva5&dl=0

u/The_MadMage_Halaster — 16 days ago

▲ 1 r/conlangs

For a language I'm working on I had the idea to use the copula as the base of each verb, to function as conjugation and whatnot. The problem is that I'm having trouble deciding on how it should be structured. For instance, should they all be unique roots or should there be some form of internal derivation system? I want to have a clusivity distinction for the 1st person, but wouldn't that mean I need to have plurals for all the persons? Because it feels weird to only have such a distinction in the 1st person. So far I have:

1st singular/inclusive- r
1st exclusive- m
2nd- ṭ
3rd- j

These are then used to form verbs, with such 'verbs' functionally acting as gerunds. Such as tat "to run." Eg: ratat "I/we run," matat "we (but not you) run," ṭatat "thou/you run," jatat "he/she/it/they run."

As you can see the plurality distinction only exists in the 1st person, does this feel natural or should I change it?

I also have a second question relating to these roots. Because so much grammatical information is tied up in the article (case, plurality, possession) I needed a way to put that in front of pronouns, so I came up with the idea of the language very easily switching between nouns and verbs by placing the article before it; and I've heard of some languages that use pronouns to form the copula, so why not the reverse?

Thus the word for "I" is śa-r (literally: "The am"), "we but not you" is śa-m, "you" is śa-ṭ, and so on. Similarly, an actual plural can be indicated due to that being marked on the article: śam ra "we," śam ṭa "you," śam ja "they." The weird part is pluralizing the exclusive pronoun, which I think would probably either only occur in the plural form, śam ma, or have the plural be unmarked, śa-m (because I really can't think of the meaning a pluralized exclusive pronoun would have). Does this all seem reasonable?

Sorry if this seems a little all over the place, but the systems are so interconnected I felt that I needed to ask both questions at once.

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u/The_MadMage_Halaster — 23 days ago

▲ 10 r/conlangs

For a language I'm working on, I plan for the order of nouns to be entirely fixed based on animacy, with the more animate nouns occurring earlier in the sentence (and among people, higher social standing occurs first). I can see two ways to get meaningful information out of this: a whole bunch of valency changing operations to get the nouns where they need to be in the sentence, or a very in-depth case/preposition system. Since I've been working for a while on a language with a complex valency system, I've decided to go mostly with the latter. I have also decided that to mark the subject, the verb will follow directly after it.

I can't quite decide what cases I want, so I'm looking for suggestions. So far these are the cases I'm thinking of using:

An unmarked nominative for the subject (which is indicated by the verb following it), and an accusative for the direct object
An allitive, ablative, and locative case to indicate movement
A dative to indicate the recipient of indirect verbs (could also have the function of the locative)
An equitive case for 'like' or 'as a' statements (subordinate clauses could also work)
An instrumental (again, subordinate clauses could also work)
A comitative to indicate co-subjects or objects

I'm thinking a lot of the grammar would follow something of the Polish style "do with X" employing the instrumental, so I might say "My boss-DAT I give present-INST" or "He walks dog-ACC leash-INST park-LOC"

Do you have any comments or suggestions?

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u/The_MadMage_Halaster — 25 days ago

▲ 2 r/conlangs

I was thinking of a number system for a language when I stumbled upon an interesting idea. Numbers would be counted in a base eight fashion on the non-thumb digits, but each thumb would also function as a multiple of eight. The right thumb has a value of eight, and the left has a value of sixteen; multiples are indicated by rocking it left to right, with each motion indicating another multiple of that thumb.

So for example, to say the number 20, one would say "left thumb and four," 24 would be "left thumb and right thumb," 32 is "two left thumb," and so on. You can even multiply them, with 128 being "left thumb by right thumb" (16*8) and so on. Of course there is some overlap, as you could just as easily say 20 as "two right thumb and four," but I imagine that larger numerals would take precedent over smaller ones. Though there could be odd situations, such as the thumbs only being used if a number goes over what they represent, so 16 is "right thumb and eight" while 17 is "left thumb and one;" and the previous example of 24 would be "left thumb and eight" while 25 is "left thumb and right thumb and one."

Does this system seem natural enough to work? I am intentionally going for an 'odd' number system for the language, and this is one of the oddest I could think of that still seems plausible.

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u/The_MadMage_Halaster — 25 days ago