Previous installments: part one, part two, part three. Now, prepare for the conclusion. It’s been great fun writing so much crap and having Bleating Lhowon disapprove of it so deeply. Let me know if you want me to keep the Essentials series going, and feel free to give me suggestions, or (if you happen to have an account here), run wild with the concept on your own.

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Par for the course, this page begins with a boring denial of the power this thread has attained. $lave tries to poop the party again,still hanging on to his wretched hope that pinning 2.5D Game Discussion in its original subforum would prevent future jouissance. Some of us, however, have our priorities straight even now. Treellama, acting like some kind of magnetic containment field, uses false tact to hold things together for just a little longer. Before I go into the specifics of his message, I must say that his balanced approach at provoking sensitive math-physicists like sweatervest became an artform during the course of the thread. The duality of what his words and his intentions has kept sweatervest coming back for more, and we can thank TL for his dedication. I wouldn’t be writing this now if it weren’t for him.

Anyway, Treellama changes his approach with ultimate effectiveness: this whole topic has been a plea to sweatervest for a sane definition of “2.5D,” and Treellama now and forever invalidates anything sweatervest could want to say by claiming Aleph One as a 3D engine: “Marathon has always required at least three dimensions (four, actually, thus so-called 5D space) to represent points in the world. I assume that’s your definition of a 3D engine.” Yeah, he makes an assumption, but it happens to be a reasonable one (something rare enough in this topic). Although I am disappointed that he doesn’t pay attention to part of cardigan’s quoted post (”I don’t think that I am some infallible expert on the subject”), he more than makes up for it with this gem that has spent half a year in obscurity: “I like to think I could be a lot more damning and insulting if I were trying. Picture Wrkncacnter, but with my post count.” Really, that describes all of CLIQUE: If I were trying. He our master. Treellama even stoops to cardigan’s level when he counters accusations of person-hating with his own real-life anecdote (the mention of Mrs. Treellama). The mellow master even ends with a fairly loch list of what the thread should have been about, and for that I salute him heartily. We’ll miss these antics when he’s busy changing diapers.

What is the noble software engineer’s reward? 900 words of glacier. This post, as a whole, is in fact more interesting than it might seem at first. Why’s that? Well, the first paragraph helps forward the idea that sweatervest has never touched Marathon before in his life. “About the Marathon engine, I don’t really know any of the details (like the 5D space thing) about the engine so I really can’t say.” Paragraph two sheds light on (in spite of his desire otherwise) cardi’s total misunderstanding of the concept of humor. “For example, you said that one of my statements in incorrect because A implies B doesn’t mean B implies A. Alright. Then the little comment on how my major must not be concerned with logic [...giant parenthetical comment...] and you’re right. That could either have been a self-glorifying statement or it could have just been a joke.” His concern about the “little comment” clearly shows he can’t take it as a joke, whether or not he thinks “I’ll joke on people and they’ll joke on me.” More commendably, sweatervest next admits that he shouldn’t have brought up the tearing apart of people’s sentences, and somehow thinks no such thing has occurred in the thread(!), blatantly ignoring his glaciers and other people’s multiquotation replies. I think sweatervest is fairly senseless by now; “I will come clean with you,” he tells Treellama, “and say a lot of times your posts evoke a visceral response of anger or frustration out of me because I feel like you are just smacking down my intellect repeatedly.” It really is a smackdown, but cardigan has already begun kowtowing to CLIQUE’s earthly representative (Treellama) and seems willing to take the blame for just about anything. Most of the rest of his reply is similar, with additional interesting clues about the nature of CLIQUE. “It’s because you have [...] made me out to be exactly what I hate.” He even throws a little loch on the grill with the stimulating “if that didn’t happen then we would all be learning about Jesus and the 6000 year old history of Earth in social studies…” Eventually, of course, the post falls apart, and it’s best to move on.

Treellama’s usual one-two punch reply confirms my own feelings that sweater is exceedingly unfamiliar with Marathon: “You should definitely give the game a try, it doesn’t feel 2D at all.” Epstein/Einstein highlights the Jesus6000 line because of his duty as an astronomer. Tertor, always willing to stir the pot a little, makes use of the words “cumbersome” and “limiting” somehow without noticing they apply better to him; he then makes a challenge toward any “spiteful poster.” W’rk, of course, is always up to that particular challenge, and Ryoko apologizes for his colleague’s aptitude. He also takes his own stab at reasonability: he goes as far as stating that even Treellama understood what the cheif23 meant when he started the topic. Treellama can’t admit it: he absolutely must, to his dying day, tell us he doesn’t understand 2.5D “Formally or informally.” He’s definitely more computer than man; “I really can not tell (and I challenge any of you to) what it means when someone says something is or is not 2.5D, without additional (cumbersome? limiting?) context.” DOES NOT COMPUTE.

OK, so we’re all about to let this thing die, right? Right? Pretty much every member of CLIQUE has had his say, except thermo, and he’s probably not–oh wait. The final horseman of the Apocalypse is finally mobile. He wields a sword made of #math. For now the sword remains sheathed in some kind of saucy reply, but from our retrospective view on this whole thing, it’s clearly just a spark to light the fuse one. Last. Time.

Sweatervest clearly senses the approach of another Mathematical Being. He tries to deflect the blow, yet in so doing, embarrasses himself again with the questions “Hmm… so does this mean that an arbitrary number of rooms or objects can be stacked over each other?” (Answer: yes). “Also could you exist in the level somewhere between the rooms that have already been placed in the level?” (Yes). He tries to soften things with a Mjolnir emoticon, but no number of emoticons can save him now. He comes right out and says it yet again: “I don’t know really anything about the Marathon engine…” Then what does he do? He tries to confuse everyone again and get all philosophical…

So this seems to have raised ANOTHER question: what does it mean to say an engine is 2D/3D? I imagine this is a complicated issue because what would count as a “dimension”?

FOR CHRIST’S SAKE. So, he finds a way to top even that in his car-without-brakes method of summarizing the whole issue at hand. I dare you to read this shit.

Allow me to try and make some sense out of the many uses of the term you’ve seen. The way I see it all of those things are consequences of lacking fully 3D capabilities in an engine so they are not rigorously correct uses of the term but kind of similar to how people often refer to trancendental numbers as those that cannot be geometrically constructed. Though this is not the definition of those numbers, it is a direct consequence of their definition. The big difference is that the 2.5D stuff doesn’t go both ways. You can say “If an engine is 2D then it uses sprites/doesn’t foreshorten” but you can’t say that “If an engine uses sprites/doesn’t foreshorten then it is 2D”. So all of those would be bad definitions of the term because there could easily be a 3D game that chooses to use all sprites, but it makes sense that people would informally describe it like that or focus on one of the results of being a 2.5D game, while the definition itself is more fundamental to the game’s functionality. This is starting to remind me of the issue of what vectors are in physics verses what they are in math. At its core the two are the same but in their respective contexts physical vectors are often considered to be much less general than mathematical vectors and can even be thought of as “different” concepts (I’m pretty sure there are separate wikis for each discipline), mostly because of how they were historically developed.

Thermo ignites the flames of math. We’ll never know if this is the entire entity thermoplyae or if the bulk of him exists somewhere outside our perception. Either way, the effect is perfect, and with so few words he successfully causes cardigan to find himself starting back…

How is it off-topic?

How do you know what I “meant” to do?

How is it invalid?

Thermo is not impressed by this obvious Story Board Syndrome. He begins with “it has nothing to do with a game being 2d or 3d in the common meanings of the words, nor 2.5d in any sense, common or uncommon”; you can almost hear the underlying words, “…and of all things visible and invisible…” He dishes out some harsh words again, pointing out that, whatever sweatervest’s intentions, the outcome was, well, 2.5D Game Discussion as we know it today. “we shouldn’t start off so halfheartedly, and we certainly shouldn’t incorrectly apply math to come up with a description,” he notes. As you can see, it’s personal now (voir “i’m glad you dropped the transcendental thing, that was embarrassing”). Just for effect, he talks about R^n Space cohomology topology transcendental.

Cardi smells blood in the water. He can’t keep away from it, trying the blame game shuffle again, even though he jolly well ought not, considering the state of affairs up until now. The engine’s developer and its top mapper have each stomped him in turn, and now a mathman is about the use his cohomology to redefine Stomped once again. When he uses phrases like “I am amused,” what does he expect? Treellama, apparently down for the count in prefiguration of his surgery just last week, tries to appeal to thermo and incindentally uses some of the “monitor images are all 2D anyway” mumbo-jumbo that we’ve all come to laugh at. At least he knows when to stop; sweater chimes right in with the question “Is Doom 3D?” If he had ever played Infinity, he’d know that somewhere along the way in this discussion, he read a failure terminal. Thermo knows where the failure occurred! Yes, sweatervest’s behavior is good enough evidence that he is entirely new to Marathon and the Marathon community, and so thermoplyae tries one last time to offer helpful advice: “welcome to the pfhorums, i believe we have a Welcome board where you can introduce yourself and get to know some of the regulars” pairs well with “if i were reasonable, i wouldn’t be here.” Alas. Alas.

Somehow, the crosstalk and furious rapid-fire posting has cause thermo to post a short, twitterlike reply that I’m frankly going to ignore, because here comes post #100! Courtesy of Our Hero, sweatervest. It’s Mr. Cardigan’s last stand; he knows it, everyone knows it. So he pulls no more punches, going along the straight and narrow of “how much does your life have to suck,” “you compensate here,” anecdotes about Writing class, and perhaps his most enduring command:

Allow me to jack you off one more time.

Page 6

Oh, I’ll allow you, cardi, I’ll allow you. Thermo will, too,

and

then

it

ends

with

RAY~~~~~~~~~~