Ended up downloading it this morning - I'm about 35 pages in, and I'm somewhat disappointed when I read the exact same insert text on page 33 that I saw some 15 pages earlier. I know you guys need to get product out, but speaking as a journalist I would have been fired for overlooking this kind of error.

i don't think it was done before intentionally as such, but i can definitely say that there have been PDF releases where something was noticed, errata released, and corrections made before printing have been sent to the printers before the book was printed. specifically, in corp guide ancient history pointed out that one of the corporation section headings (i believe it was mitsuhama) was from the version that he had made, and had not been corrected to the new version as was supposed to happen. though i suppose it technically hasn't been printed yet, has it? well, whatever

also, Vice had an update before it reached the printers.

it is, however, rather dependant on people buying and reading it before they get it printed...

Ok, sounds like it could be possible. Will see how it goes, as no print date is given yet. Looks like it was about 1,5 month between PDF and print for Corporate Guide. SWA will be very handy for my upcoming game later in August. :)

I honestly hope it comes out in a month or two. I've been reading my PDF since yesterday and it's actually pretty good. It's very prettily done. My wife is goingto kick my ass up around my shoulders for 'buying it again' but this one, will likely be worth it.

AH. I know you're a lil bent man that your stuff got taken out. And I'm sorry for that. I truely am. I've just wanted this book or one like it for years. Can't pass this one up man. But, I do have sympathy for you.

So with


it is assumed that Deus is widely known? After all, /dev/grrl is a mainstream corp brat and she wrote this for her terms paper in corp school. Her corp sponsored teacher showed her the R:AC file, which means it is accepted teaching material.

FWIW, I wonder the same thing. If anything, this event should have jump-started a technophobic movement. But the 6th world reacts weirdly to tech going amok, by indulging with the problem tech even more. Crash 2is the same kind of weirdness.

yeah the time line is pretty lobbily edited/proofread, that same timeline for a year also happens with 2040/2044 inserts and te one doc mentions is years 2006/2020.

/facepalm

Yeah, I don't know what to tell you, hermit. That section you quoted is pretty dumb, in my opinion.

Or, maybe, the whole "technomancer are the new witches, but AIs are totally ok" line wasn't that cool to begin with.

No way, RvD.


I agree, but by now I would just really like an official position. We now have "LOL they made it Reality TV" (SOTA 2063), "Nobody knows what happened in the Arcology, and survivors were mind wiped and now suffer from AIPS" (Emergence), "Bad shit happened but people blamed Renraku's applicances" (Arsenal, also posted by a writer) and finally now "They teach it in corp school, where they also have shadowland accounts" (SRA).

Which of these possibilities will be considered canon?

There were a lot of arguments over that one, and it was a fairly large problem with conceptual grasp: that not only was everything in ever sourcebook true (or should be true), but not everybody knew everything either. I mean, the shadows got a first-hand inside-scoop on it; various corporate and government agencies have different levels of information on what went on - you can get all that from Renraku Arcology Shutdown and Brainscan - but the general public? Schoolkids? No. I mean, hell there would be conspiracy theories, media built up around the urban legends, but Emergence doesn't work if everybody is already blase about AIs.

Yeah. Though Emergence went a bit too far with nobody knowing of the Arc being a den of Killbots, which had been established as known in SOTA already. The compromise that everyone blamed faulty drones works well enough, I think.

The official position while I was develop was that the actual events of the Renraku Arcology Shutdown are only partially known to the general public. Yes, the Arcology went into shutdown, the SCIRE control system went nuts. Thousands of people died inside. The Arcology's automated security systems went haywire and turned against those trapped inside. Apparently some systems even conducted experimentation on metahumans. The Banded Otaku were involved with the shutdown from early on and may have had a hand in subverting the SCIRE systems. The military were required to liberate the Arcology. The few survivors came out mentally, emotionally, and physically scared. A handful mention something called Deus, though no-one could actually put a face to this individual/otaku/entity/whatever and nobody is certain what exactly it was - or even if "it" even existed. In fact most survivors have no contact with this entity at all. The fact that a number of survivors later showed signs of extreme post-traumatic stress, fugue states, psychotic episodes and more (as a result of Deus' Network), made the testimonies even less reliable. There is no remaining evidence of Deus' existence anywhere. Renraku quashed any mention of AI research and Deus, it handed over the Arcology to the city by way of reperations, closed down most of its Seattle presence and spun the hell out of a miserable situation.

The shadows, the megacorps and certainly parts of the government are very aware that this isn't the whole story. All have an interests in keeping the information contained following the Crash. Emergence takes place when that status quo shatters with the knowledge of (second gen) AIs becoming widespread.

I take full responsability for those lines in SR4A. They are a mistake and should have been changed to reflect what I've said above. It was a slip. Mea culpa.

Why exactly do "the shadows" have an interest in keeping this information contained? Shadowrun is still a world with earnest muckrakers, trideo pirates and neo-anarchists. More importantly, it is a heavily divided and balkanized world that rarely agrees on one thing completely.

Of course, all such information and said shadowland file most likely isn't canonical teaching material - which doesn't keep the individual from having it. That's pretty different from "widely known", though. And people do have reservations about AI, as per Unwired Game Information p. 165. So after people bought the anti-technomancer add-on snake oil for their firewall, the anti-AI extension will be marketed.

*shrugs*
Propaganda on the other end telling people that these sources don't know shit and are crazy maybe?
I'm kinda surprised that today the chaos computer club and wikileaks are regarded as good sources.
Some years back, they would have been derided as paranoid computer freaks and criminal spies. . .

Uh - that's SOP. Today and in Shadowrun.

Meh.

I'm curious as to when a random corp teacher got her gritty little fingers into Shadowland...

Shadowland, for all it's vaunted secrecy, seemed pretty easy to get into sometimes. Everyone had a login of some kind. Some of the supplements even had what appeared to be random Joe Corpers logging in, typically clueless. A semi-street-smart teacher would have no idea.

Maybe I'm confusing myself with Shadownland and ShadowSEA but as far as I can recall, Shadowland/ShadowSEA was pretty much like 4chan. Anyone could log into it and post see whatever they wanted, but there was a part of it that only l33t people could go.

I've seen proofs that were freshly designed and pre-proofreading that had fewer errors than this pdf so far. I really, really hope they haven't sent it to the printer yet, because if they have, the general, non-dumpshock reading customers are going to start to lose the general perception of Catalyst books being high quality.

Also, to put it in delicate terms, the Amazonia section reads like it was written very quickly. I'm particularly bothered by the first half of the paragraph about Manaus.



If they're not grouping non-metahuman sapients in with the term metahuman there (particularly the "types most people aren't aware even exist"), I'm certainly curious as to what the hell is being talked about. But I think they are.

That's what I wanted to know. So the essence of the average Joe's knowledge about the Arc is "System went haywire because creepky Otaku took over". I take it most of the weird behavior for being Network nodes was attibuted to PTSD and such.

I assume, also, Colloton is among the people in the government aware of what really happened in the Arc and what the SCIRE actually was. So the New Revolution are in on this?

Still makes peoples' acceptance of AI and 'mancers a bit too fast for my taste, but maybe that was one of these "let's publish a cut down variant instead of burying this entirely" incidents. Anyway, that's something I can live with and use to connect the various statements in early 4th Edition books into something relatively coherent (as much as all SR canon is). Thanks.

I assume that is the photosynthesis elf metavariant they introduced, which is an Amazonian native.

I think some folks might be reading more into the /dev/grrl post than is there. Try looking at it another way. Here is the original post:



Now try this one on for size:



I'm not defending the other problems in the Almanac. I'm just saying that in the case of this one quote, nothing in it suggests widespread public knowledge - or at least nothing akin to "everyone knows the truth." At best it reflects an activist teacher overstepping his/her corporate bounds to spread something that the teacher believes is true and that he/she things the kids, or at least this one gifted student, should know.

Looks like the ingame clock just advanced by seven or eight years and nobody told us...and obviously in the meantime something happened which restored Europe's coastline to how it looked before the Black flood

Does anyone elses PDF have really weird maps? On mine you can see the cities and stuff but large sections are just black. You can't really differentiate between land and sea in most places unless the land is mountainous. I'm wondering if I got a bad DL or if there's been some update or something

Is there a street date for release?

I'm not sure what you mean; mine looks fine. Maybe you could post a screenshot of some of the relevant damage? (Preferably of NA, since that map's free so you won't have to worry about copyright issues at all).

By the way, I've finished a relatively in depth perusal of the book by now, and I have one big question: why was half the book spent on a history section that's primarily a rehash of stuff we already know? I mean, it's convenient to have it all in one place, I guess, and there's definitely some new details in there...but on the whole, I at least would have preferred more countries instead.

I love the first half. Because 99.9999% of people don't know all of that. I didn't know half of it. or if I did, I didn't know exactly when it came down and what not.

To me, the first half of the book was a rich 'lore' section and I loved it. I stopped reading when I got to the second half. I'll read the rest. Don't get me wrong but yeah. I'm very much glad they did it this way. There's 20 years of lore written out in easily digestiable format for people to consume.

Awesome.

I guess that's fair. Still, and I hate to sound like Ancient History here, it seems like two half-length projects that happened to be bound in the same jacket.

But the thing is, if it's two half length projects that I would buy separately, and they're in one jacket, for one price. I'm going to buy it.

I very much like the book. If my maps didn't like like night side images of earth, it'd be a bit better. I'm going to be picking this one up in Dead tree format if it makes it there too.

Yeah I posted a few pages back about the same issue. No one replied then.

I haven't noticed any issues - everything seems to look fine.  I got my copy from Battlecorp and am using PDF-XChange.  I did notice a problem with a download from DTRPG earlier this week and was only able to view the PDF using Adobe Acrobat Reader - think it is due to the security used on the file.

AJC

When I use Adobe on my PC it works fine. but when it's on the Ipad the maps are all fraked up. very very dark, the only thing that shows up are thep lace names, and any bright brown or very dark green sections. The 'light green' and water and stuff just blacken out.

If it works on your PC, it sounds like a problem with your iPad rendering, then. I don't know what iPad's display resolution and available color set is like (compared to your PC), but I'm betting it's a resolution problem combined with an incompatible color scheme. Likely iPad doesn't support the colors presented in the map or is reading the codes wrong.

On my Macbook Pro the colours are pretty much the same as on the iPad. Really hard to see. The iPad is worse, but they're both not good.

That's the thing. The IPad can show HD movies like the new Star Trek one flawlessly. It's not an 'inability' of the Ipad.

The post just below yours does seem to indicate it's a 'mac' problem though. Something that Catalyst might want to look into for their PDFs.

My previous Shadowrun PDF's all work flawlessly. I've gotten everyhting except for Vice and they all work fine on the Ipad.

Considering Apple has decided to hate Adobe, maybe they just do not like .pdf anymore on their new-and-cool toys?

EDITED: I'm feeling pretty crabby and was a lot more unpleasant than I think I needed to be. Here is the friendly version.

1. The iPad can handle it. In fact, I happen to have one of the original map jpegs, uploaded it to my ipad, and it looks great. It's only the PDF.

2. I tried multiple readers on the iPad. They all have the same problem. This suggests the readers themselves are not broken.

3. It could be that an adobe only feature was used to build the pdf (or some other feature not widely supported). I think testing PDFs on multiple platforms, different hardware, and with multiple reader software, would be wise to avoid this sort of thing. Using something that non-Windows, non-Adobe readers can't support is just a bad idea because it creates a bad experience for non-windows/non-adobe users - a fast growing market.

4. It could be that the PDF is broken. Just because it displays fine on one OS doesn't make it "not-broken". It's like having a flat tire. From one side of the car everything looks fine. From the otherside - flat tire.

Finally, offering a "likely" diagnosis without knowing the capabilities of a piece of hardware isn't a good idea. It feels like a "must be your hardware" brush off rather than any real interest in the frustrations people are feeling.

Well, all arguments lead to an Apple problem. The source of the might be many things, including the fact that Apple doesn't want to be friends with Adobe anymore...
Should Catalyst have tested the .pdfs on many different computer's OS, kindles, iPads, et cetera? Sure! But perhaps they have tested with a single eBook and thought all of them would handle. The best thing to do is send a message to CGL directly instead of complain in a unofficial "official" forum.

Posting "hey, is anyone seeing this?" is a perfectly reasonable thing to do here.

Doing a set of tests and posting the results is a way to narrow down a problem among a group of people with the same issue. This is typically useful and I believe it is here as well. If I had discovered a particular reader renders the image properly, this would have proved very useful to other iPad users who are reading the 6WA.

Nothing in my post criticized CGL or their testing of the PDF. I simply identified how this could have occurred and ways to avoid it in the future. You don't need to defend them from a non-attack.

Finally, who cares if it leads to Apple. The iPhone and iPad are an important platform for people doing e-publishing. Whatever the reason for the problem, there IS a problem and it should be addressed IF CGL wants to please its customers.

I will say, that itdoesn't slow me down all that much, but the maps -are- a major portion of the book and having them invalid for my platform is not fun. Sure I can pull them up on the PC and look at them but i shouldn't 'have' to. You know? I paid $25 for a 15 second down load. I'd like it to work properly.

And here i actually thought Apple-Computers would have been used in the layouting stuff, seeing how propaganda still tells people that they are better in that regard than usual PC's O.o

I'm sorry I offended you, but all I was doing was what people do on tech forums all day long (and I am a technology professional in my day job). One person posts a problem, another posts a likely diagnosis and people go back and forth *testing* different solutions to see what works.

If you don't agree with my diagnosis, that's okay. But please accept it in the spirit it was intended in, which was not "your iPad is broken" so much as a starting point for narrowing down what the real problem is.

Make it Robotic Drop Bears and we have a true conspiracy in the works

They are. But the libraries that Apple supplies for reading PDFs natively on OS X and in iOS are not as robust as Adobe's reader, and one of the major flaws with Apple's library is it's lousy at dealing with CMYK as opposed to RGB PDFs. Another is the lack of Layers. To be blunt, if you're on OS X, you should have Adobe Reader installed if you're reading complex PDFs -- it's better. If you're on iOS devices, you should tell Apple that you want better PDF support.

(One of my freelance gigs right now is fixing stuff on DriveThruRPG from a variety of publishers to make them work better on the iPad. )

This is sort of where my thoughts were heading on the rendering issue, though I don't know enough about Apple's software to talk about the actual mechanics. Thank you for this information, Adam.

Sounds like Jackpot, seeing how those nutcases buy these things ^^

The iPad is a fucking beautiful and useful and fun device. And has already paid for itself.

Well . . i can't even really say:"but YOU don't have to do support for it!" anymore right now . .
Granted, on my end, it's tech-support, but eh ^^
I still think it's a fucking dumb invention. Next thing, if i had to guess, is gonna be the iPad mini, which is gonna be a 5" iPhone . .
No flash support. Micro SIM meaning you can't use your old sim without problem . . and so on and so on <.<
But let us not do this here, and derail this thread any further with my hatred for the rotten apple . .

Please, just this last one derail