Ross's Game Dungeon: The Cave World Saga

Ross explores the cave world in pursuit of dinosaurs and space trucking.

Ztranslate link:

Abandonware link:

[Rick]

"A secret temple in the jungle that only Germans have been to" is literally the plot of Pathways Into Darkness.

[keithmichael]

Your girl is cheating on you while you're out making hauls and vaguely looking for some crystal. This is a fairly accurate trucking simulator

[JomasterTheSecond]

"Today we have a SPECIAL episode!"
Oh shush Ross, we all know that _every_ episode is special.

[z-beeblebrox]

"I have a certain respect for software that's really inefficient and finicky, but is also performing small miracles nothing else can"
100% agree. Janky Genies, I call em.

[johnarmstrong]

"He should just get out of here and go back to space-trucking. He has everything he needs to write his own country song:
Girl of his dreams left him for an android; he gets arrested trying to save her, busts out of jail, tames a dragon, and she doesn't even care."


Now that's a kind of heartache I can relate to.

[Palmieres]

_Barry_ unlocked it? I thought Jill was the Master of Unlocking.

[GmodPlusWoW]

Mad props to Barry's ZTranslate software, even if it needs a little more work. Without it, we probably wouldn't even have SEEN our trucker boy get screwed over by Sierra-level antagonism.

[SaberVS]

"Collie" = Collaborator, in case anyone was confused.


In context: Prisoners being "Sold to a Collie" means "Being sold to someone loyal to the Regime"

[Feasco]

Sierra: "We delight in making our puzzles, obtuse, confusing and outright hostile to the player."
Cave World Saga: "Halte meine bier."

[Batzyyx]

Well if nothing else the game teaches a lesson; sometimes there are people in your life that actually aren't worth it and will never change, and the best thing for you is to get the hell out of there as soon as possible.

[PsychoJosh]

Usually whenever someone tells me they're the ultimate weapon against the lizard people, I go to a different bar

[acouragefann]

So apparently this game was a sort of stepping stone for the guy who wrote the story on his way to becoming a published author - which actually happened with the novels set in this world in the early 2000s.

Harald Evers seem to have written at quite a pace, because "the cave world" actually got about 8 books (2 sets of 4) published in half a decade. He had intended for "the caveworld saga" to conclude in the third cycle of four novels for a total of 12, but he died of a heart attack at the (young) age of 49 in the mid-2000s, leaving the ending unknown; just like in the game that started it all for him (and I suppose some fans who know his work).

[Kazath]

56 MINUTES. You spoil us, you magnificent caveman.

[Malovane]

Seems like the ideal way to win was to go grab a couple beers, head back to your ship, fly over the town while dumping your septic, then move on to the next world.

[craigstege]

"I don't think MacDougan has any real goals, he's just doing what other people tell him to."

Confirmed: Most accurate trucker sim ever. In space.

[ewatfred]

Task Manager --> Details Tab --> Find the process name --> Right click menu --> Set Affinity --> Choose non-primary core you want the process to run on. Voila, you've freed up your primary core!

[zr_]

Here’s MY personal award for this game: “Least Grateful Girlfriend”

[judas_physicist]

Ross did you really expect the developers of Nyet 3 to make an adventure game with currency to spend on multiple things from dragon parking fees to beer, and not allow you to screw yourself over if you spend it carelessly? I'm suprised the Nyet 3 mascot did not make a cameo in the game, or was secretly the lizard overlord.

[remedan]

The Neverhood has a longer unskippable walk. The infamous Hall of Records. It definitely takes over 5 minutes. And it's absolutely required to finish the game.

[dt]

The threading issue described at 4:57 is due to how the Windows kernel operates. Due to legacy restrictions, there is little to no non-blocking IO in Windows. That means that if something is reading from a device like the hard drive, the other processes on the system all stop until the data is read. Excessive HD usage? Single-threaded OS, more or less. Do multiple cores improve performance on Windows? Depends. Usually not. If you ran the program in Wine on another OS, that wouldn't happen, but then the program might not work at all, or might have odd bugs.


Welcome to computer hell. We hope you don't enjoy your stay. This is one of the reasons why Microsoft has looked at changing out the kernel multiple times over the years. If they do that, though, then they're basically running Wine on Linux (or MacOS, or BSD, etc), and we get a nightmare scenario even worse than the WNT/W2K/WXP mess that on its own already lasted half a decade or longer, depending on who you ask. Bottom line, the core speed matters more than core count on Windows, as Windows spends half or more of its time being incapable of running two or more CPUs at once, and high HD throughput (especially on drives with damaged HDs - oh god that hurts so much) will absolutely hamstring the computer, especially on seek time delays.


If you want the technicial details, it basically boils down to design choices in the old DOS and OS/2 kernels. Those kernels mostly ran on a single processor system, and CPU time was precious. DOS's IO.SYS barely counts as a kernel, but we'll avoid that argument here and just say it is. It assumed only one program was resident at a time, and swapped programs out only when an interrupt call happened - TSRs being the typical offender here. OS/2 maintained DOS compatibility, and rather than using mutexes and semaphores or process separation or memory pools as modern OS design usually does, they just blocked every thread when anything accessed any data storage location that could be shared between processes. That includes shared RAM addresses, hard drives, network devices, sound devices, or any other hardware that more than one program might be connected to. This made DOS compatibility easy, as they could essentially run the whole OS core as a sort of TSR when running DOS, using interrupt requests to switch back to enable pseudo-multithreading. Windows NT improved that design somewhat over the years through replacing older IO API calls with new multithreading-capable calls, but some of that legacy code couldn't be replaced without breaking most of the existing software, and not all programs (and system API calls themselves) stopped using those old crappy API calls. So Windows 10 in 2019 still can't run a background task when reading from the HD, and excessive HD reads (or network traffic, etc) will cause an all-stop situation as it processes.


A possible solution if you have a good network card: use a NAS. Good network card drivers offload IO queuing to the hardware, and storage IO blocking is handled by the destination device, and not by your OS. That frees up the CPU on your computer to do CPU things, and lets a separate (hopefully not OS/2-based) device worry about preventing multiple programs from writing to the same place at the same time. Of course, the protocol used there matters too, so you might need to use FTP instead of CIFS to make it work well. That gets complicated, but cheaper than a new CPU.