Ruminations of a Wanderer

2011 In Review

2012-01-01T18:41:00.000-05:00

In what is becoming a somewhat unintended tradition, here is 2011 in review. I'm still in the same place for now the third consecutive year which is a record of some sort. Otherwise, a pretty uneventful year, really but that's not necessarily a bad thing. On to the gaming!

Rift: *****
This is what I want to see out of a new MMO studio: a well realized world with interesting encounters and a lot of player-friendly features. The UI is top notch and the launch was exceptional and I may have already talked about it some. The only major downsides were that there really was only two months or so of content and I didn't have a reliable crew. I'll give them a pass for the latter, but the former really is inexcusable. I'm told now by people who still play that they've consolidated servers--never a good sign. I enjoyed my time there, however, and it stands as a shining example of how you launch an MMO.

Mount & Blade Warband: ***
A reasonable graphical refinement of the original Mount & Blade with some fun new gameplay additions. Otherwise, they've slowed down the campaign and not fixed a bunch of the terrible game play issues. It does become tedious after a while but I haven't yet felt the need to mod it. Really pretty disappointing if I'm honest.

Mount & Blade: With Fire and Sword: **
More of a commercial mod with the original engine, they've managed to take all the really broken things and make them worse while also taking out some of the things that made the original game great. One of the notable additions is firearms which is absolutely great if you can get your guys to hit (and one shot) their targets--not real great when the opponent does so to you. I suspect that this is much cooler if you know the fiction it's based on but I don't.

Dragon Age: Awakening: ***
A pretty reasonable expansion for Dragon Age--enjoyable but with a couple pretty jarring flaws. You can import your old character from Dragon Age: Origins in Mass Effect style which is great...unless your character died at which point no one (yourself included) seems to be aware of it. No really notable characters (I can barely remember any of them, TBH) and while the story was good, as Yahtzee likes to point out, Bioware doesn't get points for that anymore.

Dragon Age 2: ***
Mixed bag here. On the one hand, it's a pretty good standalone RPG with a very good storytelling presentation (even if the story itself wasn't up to Bioware standards). On the other hand, it had to follow Dragon Age: Origins which IMO was hands down better. DA2 was set in the same world but with totally different characters and only the vaguest of tie-ins with the original Anders notwithstanding. It also broke up the world into terribly disjoint areas which you moved between with very little attachment. The characters were interesting but really lacked the standout Shale or HK-47 that we've come to expect though Merrill and Aveline get honorable mention.

Serious Sam III: ****
I am an unabashed Serious Sam fan since the original when working on my first title people kept saying "you can't just make a shooter where you shoot monsters". Since then they've made exactly a game where all you do is shoot monsters, usually a pile of them. The environments are detailed, the monsters are ugly, the levels are unbelievably well designed, and the one-liners are on point. Sam Stone is a better Duke Nukem than the Duke himself. While I don't usually like to review games I haven't finished yet, unless it takes an uncharacteristic turn for the worse, I think I'm going to be pretty happy with it.

Star Wars: The Old Republic: ***
And this would be why I haven't finished it yet. I'm on record as wanting this game to succeed because if it doesn't, it probably marks the end of the big-budget MMOs--the kinds of games that I really like. Unfortunately, I think it falls short despite poaching a lot of people who should know better from a former employer (formerly Mythic Entertainment). SWTOR's approach to story telling is largely instanced and is probably the logical extension from LoTRO's method which is nice but the high points are pretty spread out probably due to the sheer volume of content. The voicing is also a nice addition but that comes with good and bad (female jedi knight & male jedi consular: painful). On the downside, there are a LOT of bugs, the game hurts (a lot) for a lack of multi-specs and customizable UI, and minus the thin per-class quest line there is almost zero replayability per faction. I can't shake the feeling that they needed another 6 months to sort out some of the rough edges and if I'm honest, I think I would have preferred to get KOTOR 3 instead. We'll see what the end game's like, but I suspect I'm going to be disappointed.

You'll thank me later.

2011-11-19T23:06:00.001-05:00

No, seriously. Watch that.

Programmer Art

2011-10-02T23:55:00.001-04:00

If you've been here before, you probably know that I still have art pretension. This is Faith from Afterlife Blues which is illustrated by a coworker.

Original resolution was something like 1500x3600 done almost entirely in ArtRage. This is the only reasonable piece I've done since...er...last March.

BrickFair 2011

2011-08-07T21:10:00.001-04:00

BrickFair 2011 is officially over. This time I knew what I was getting myself into and went in better prepared. For those who don't frequent my flickr stream, I completed SHIP #4 in July, the Jaguar-class BCL. She was built in about 300 hours over the course of about two months topping the scales at around 40 pounds and ~8,000 pieces. The ship deconstructs into about 100 large-ish pieces that all fit into the nice car which sadly I didn't end up taking. Five hours of reconstruction on site and she was ready for show. I also took four fighters: two of these guys and one each of these.

And what a show it was! It amazes me that Lego people are so goshdarned awesome, pretty much as a rule. I got to catch up with some old pals and got to meet some awesome new ones (do follow the links--those guys do amazing work). It was good times dampened only by being pretty hung-over from a bottle of expensive scotch that I shouldn't have bought. To top it all off, the Jag took the award for "Best in Space" which is both awesome and unexpected. I'm already thinking of all the fun-cool-sweet stuff that I want to build now that the event is winding down. Scheduling gods willing, I'll be back next year in good form.

Rift: The Bad

2011-05-30T23:34:00.001-04:00

No game is without its flaws, and Rift is no different. As always, your mileage may vary.

Steep Learning Curve
Most games of this type suffer from this kind of thing mostly because they are fairly complex. That's to be somewhat expected. The Ascended system takes this the next logical step. In other games you choose your class, maybe bits of your spec, and you're on your way. At the very beginning of Rift you pick your first soul. You've already picked a class and now there's more to choose? Worse yet, you're picking from a largish list with only the barest of information.

One of the strengths of the game is its customizabiliy so it's hard for me to single it out in this installment. On the other hand, it is tremendously confusing for anyone who a) isn't hardcore, and b) hasn't done a mess of research about the game before hand, and c) has played other games in the genre I got this stuff all sorted in beta but as part of the head start program, a very large number of the people in my guild had not. These are some of the frequently asked questions:

Q: Am I stuck with the souls I picked? A: no, you can pick up all the souls at level 13 through quests.
Q: How many points do I get to spend in my spec? A: 66 at level 50; you get one per level and two for every level that's an even multiple of 3.
Q: How do I get new abilities? A: most of the time you get them automagically by spending points in a spec tree (in the root, unlocked by total point count). Sometimes you can pick them directly in the spec.
Q: Can I respec? A: yes, at the trainer and it's not terribly expensive.
Q: What is a role and why do I care? A: a role is a slot for a single spec. You can have up to [s]four[/s] five of these so that you can change your character for any particular encounter.

There's a lot to know, and the game doesn't do a sufficient job explaining it all to you. So Joe Nub(TM) gets in there and starts worrying about every decision and/or blindly re-rolling because it isn't clear that almost nothing about your character is permanent.

Misconceptions From Other Games
A better segue, I could not conceive. What makes the Ascended system hard to get your head around is the fact that it's not really at all like other games. When you get it all out on the page it's pretty obvious that the devs put some serious thought into not make any given decision painful. This is not helped by other games in the genre.

For those of you who don't remember the Bad Old Days(TM), let's take a trip down memory lane. Your class defined/defines everything you can do. If you're a cleric, you heal and not much else. If you wear plate, you tank and not much else. If you can stealth, you DPS but only if no one is hurting you, yadda, yadda, yadda. We all know the score. If you could spec (and in a lot of games you couldn't) you were lucky if you could respec--ever, and sometimes it required the killing of a dragon.

As mentioned in the previous post, lots of builds shatter the usual holy trinity's usual cast of characters. To make matters worse, you can swap it between combats if you so choose! Unlike in other games where there was a pretty clear cut best choice, Rift allows you supreme flexibility and I like that. Unfortunately there are a (very) large number of people who a) don't get it, b) don't want to get it, and c) try to impose their Right Way(TM) onto the other players in the game. Just as the community often made Champions Online bad, the same is also true for Rift, just not to such an extreme level.

Limited Appearance Customization
Most games in the genre have very, very complicated and adjustable faces and/or costumes. There are usually lots of options and lots of ways to build exactly the face you want, given the time and the inclination. A lot of times this also means that you can create some terribly horrific looking characters but all in all you don't spend a lot of time looking at your own character's face anyway.

Rift streamlines this tremendously. Each {race, gender} pair has a single face with a very limited number of different features to adjust. The face slider is a triangle with big chunky types at the left, thin types at the right, and square-jawed types at the bottom. The game lets you pick anything within the continuum and does the appropriate blending in game. The upshot is that it's very hard to get a character that doesn't look right which I like. The downside is that it's not uncommon to walk around in the main cities and see many of your identical twins. I don't like that.

But it gets worse! A lot of the gear in the game shares the same art assets. This is to be expected. One of the bigger problems is that a lot of the top end gear is identaical but the lower level ones aren't. In a game where you want top end gear to be aspirational, it's almost criminal for the art between epic tiers to be the same. Say what you want about the art style but this part isn't so good.

Raid Timers on Expert Dungeons
Expert dungeons are what you might expect: everything cranked up to 11 in the instances you've already done. The old bosses have new tricks and there are new bosses to learn. This is all well and good. The difficulty curve is relatively easily overcome for competent players. Personally, I liked the increased difficulty even if it led to some nail-biting and grey hairs.

The bad part is that progression is very much gated on completing expert dungeons so that you can either get the rare dropped upgrade or enough plaques to buy gear but there are one day lockouts on expert dungeons. Why? The drops in the expert dungeons aren't spectacular on the whole and until recently you could clear an entire instance and get only blue non-upgrades. With daily quests giving ~~most~~ all of the plaque rewards there's even less incentive to run them over and over again for a given group. Worse yet, if your group of friends is oddly sized or isn't immaculately balanced in terms of roles, you can't run it twice to get everyone the rewards. That stinks.

If a group goes into a 5-person dungeon and farms the first boss to get X to drop, who really cares? Was there really a need to make people wait around a day to try again? These are not raids! The upgrades are good but not stellar. Did there really need to be a lockout? Sure, you can PUG them, but who wants to do that? This leads us to...

Lack of Medium Sized Group Content
There is a big difference between doing one group content and raid content. This is usually in the form of logistics like getting people geared, in the right place, and generally going in the same direction. It sounds easy but it's not (trust me). In the best case there's a reasonable stepped progression that makes the bigger things seem more accessible.

Vanilla WoW had a real tough time with this requiring maybe 15 people for an UBRS run and a pretty solid 40 for a serious Molten Core run. This progression was then fixed (much to my benefit) by adding the Zul'Gurub and Ahn'Qiraj 20 person raids. That meant a much easier progression with the added benefit that raids usually had better gear moving to the next tier. Rift until recently, did not have that. Prior to launch Trion said that they had 10 and 20 person versions of all the raids so that if you were in a smallish guild or more casual one that you still had fun things to do. There were also supposed to be 10 person raid rifts that were appropriately tuned to people not geared for the big raids. Both of these were cut prior to release. At the time of this writing, the game has been out for just over 3 months and they're just now adding the 10 person content. This probably doesn't seem bad until you consider that I hit cap in two weeks and I work full time.

There have been lots of people in small or casual guilds that have already done all of the appropriate 5-person content and have nowhere to go. Because it doesn't take all that long to hit 50 there isn't as much investment in your characters and thus far less reason to stick around to try to get into the big raids. Sure, you can do the small number of expert rifts in a raid and get one or two reasonable drops but right now it takes five clears of T1 instances to be able to open one. It takes ten clears of T2 instances to open a raid rift and you'd better be well geared to have a hope of completing one. Remember: you can't run more people through easy experts because of the lockouts so if you're short a healer or tank and/or for whatever reason can't form regular groups, you're kind of out of luck.

As mentioned earlier, the last patch addresses some of these issues. There are new 10 person raids. There are also new crafting rifts and they've made expert and raid rifts easier to open. It looks like there's hope yet, but it remains to be seen if this is enough or if lasting damage has already been done to the playerbase.

The Grind
Rift is an easy game to level in. I kind of wish it wasn't. When you get to 50 and aren't in a raiding guild (as in: most people) you thankfully aren't excluded from gear progression. The bad part is that gear progression comes in the form of a particularly ugly grind. If you're like me, you want to see everything so you go through all of the appropriate dungeons more or less at the appropriate levels. Maybe you run them twice. But now you hit cap and want to progress and you go back to those same dungeons on expert mode.

The problem lies first with the itemization which is largely lacking for many roles, and next in the fact that you mostly get upgrades through items bought with plaques. Drop rate for epics in the expert dungeons (read: meaningful upgrades) is not especially high which means that you mostly need to complete runs to gather enough plaques to buy gear. On the surface, buying gear from plaques earned by killing bosses/finishing quests seems like a good idea. You do X runs, you buy Y gear at a fixed rate. The problem is that they haven't settled on what a good rate is, yet. Without belaboring the point, it's been changed a handful of times since release and at every change it gets slower. This seems bad.

It looks a lot like a dev team that's struggling to slow down turnover, but this isn't a great way to do it. At some point you've seen all the dungeons and have been unlucky enough with drops that you look at the tiny number of plaques you have and the number of plaques you still need and come to the conclusion that it just isn't worth it anymore. No one wants a grind and as cool as the instances are the first handful of times, if you go through the same ones for weeks on end, they lose their luster very quickly. But what else is there to do?

Rift: The Good

2011-04-29T19:14:00.000-04:00

Most of you probably know that I've been playing Rift since beta. Since my time is most likely drawing to a close there, I thought I'd give it the usual treatment. It is the kind of MMO that I tend to like: deep, complex, and the kind of game where player skill is important and immediately apparent. There's a lot to like which I'll sum up here in the usual no-particular-order.

Well Realized World
The world as a whole is consistent both in art and in storytelling for the most part. The settings are all fairly distinct though perhaps not as memorable as, say, Snake Gulch, but really. Each zone has its own theme and a story line of varying quality weaving through the quest chains that more people would enjoy if they could be bothered to read. The instances are also themed and woven fairly interestingly in with the plot of the rest of the world. The end result is quite good if you're into that kind of thing which I realize most people aren't.

The Ascended Class System
The mile high view of the class system goes a little something like this: you pick one of four classes and then three of a bunch of souls which determines what your character can do. Each soul is themed (offense, defense, heals, utility, etc.) and tailored per class. You get your typical one or two points per level and actively spend them to get the improvements you want but those points count two ways. First, you get the thing you're directly improving (reduce cast times, increase crit chances, get a new spell, etc). Second, you get points toward that tree which opens up a set of fixed powers (the "root" powers). So you can spend 10 points however you like within the framework and get the same root powers that everyone spending point in that soul gets. The upshot is that finding the best builds is a little trickier but that you're never really left with an unplayable build.

Putting builds together in interesting ways is the crux of this system. You can build offense powerhouses, rock-hard defensive masters, and jacks of all trades with a little effort. Mages and rogues can heal, clerics and rogues can tank, and warriors can be masterful damage dealers. But it's better than that, even. You can have up to four roles which you can use to house completely different builds. My main character is a cleric and I mainly tanked, but I can also DPS or heal with a pretty simple change of a role. If you like the meta game of creating effective builds, then you'll love Rift. Unfortunately, this also causes some issues which we'll discuss in the next installment.

Cutting Edge UI
As a former UI programmer, I know all too well that UI tends to fall into the bin labeled "under the radar unless it's crap" which usually means that if you get feedback for it at all, it's usually negative. Rift bucks this trend by doing exactly what WoW did: it took the best parts of contemporary games and added some bits that make it even better. There's a button that sells all the vendor trash from your inventory. There's a search for your backpack in case you can't find what you're looking for. There's a clickable icon in your on-screen quest tracker for items you need to use to advance a quest. It's not any one thing, but myriad small things tacked onto a UI that's both different and familiar that makes it great. It just plain makes the game better and I like that.

Many people criticize the UI as being "too WoW-like". Are they mad? Why wouldn't you steal the streamlined and polished UI from the industry leader from which some very large percentage of your user base comes from? I'm sorry, it's like a candy bar being too chocolatey--it just doesn't make sense! Conventions, whether we like where they came from or not, are just that. You expect them to be there and in the way you remember; changing them for spite's sake is not conducive to usability.

Invasion Events
One of Rift's better additions is that occasionally, based on population, rifts will open up periodically in the game world. These can have varied encounter mechanics usually culminating in a boss all defeatable in about ten minutes. If not closed, these rifts will periodically spawn an invasion squad that tromps through the world attacking players and NPCs it encounters on the way. If the population is high enough in an area, the game will start a major invasion in which piles of rifts will open up spawning yet more piles of invasion squads that usually takes over quest hubs and the like. Lose too many quest hubs and the invasion "succeeds" and the boss won't spawn typically leaving quest hubs in an unusable but reversible state. With a little bit of strategery, however, players can defend key points, drive back the invaders, and spawn a raid boss that tromps through the world wreaking havoc. Downing any of the invaders yields currencies that can be used to buy interesting gear and downing one of the raid bosses can be very lucrative.

You would think that having your quest hubs worked over by mobs would suck and it indeed can be unfortunate to log into the middle of a giant invasion. In practice however, it's quite fun and you can lose hours just flowing from rift to rift. Being OCD about playing these kinds of games, I leveled quickly and I was very saddened to not see an invasion once I'd passed the middle of the leveling curve.

Interesting Encounters
Back in the bad old days you had a tank, plopped them in front of a mob, stuck a healer behind with the "1" key weighted down and went to town. Sure, you needed a team of oxen to move the tank into place and you had to be mindful to punch at least one breathing hole into his helmet, but it was nonetheless pretty good. Then someone got the bright idea that what these encounters really needed was more dancing. It isn't difficult at all to imagine a malicious encounter designer belting off a proper evil laugh from the depths of a hollowed out volcano in expectation of thousands of players being manipulated as if by invisible designery strings.

Most of the encounter dances in Rift are of the form "don't stand in the fire" or "don't do X when Y is announced". Since most of this comes through clearly in the presentation often with AV accompaniment from the UI, the cues are fairly hard to miss. Then penalties for not doing the right thing in these events is usually pretty harsh and is sometimes "death" in a "do not pass go" kind of way. A lot of people dislike this, but I think it's fantastic. It means that you must be at least this competent to progress and it starts out in the very first instances. Player skill matters and in a game that you expect people to play a lot of, you need that kind of thing.

So it's all Good, Then?
Well...no. We'll discuss some of what they got wrong (and got really, really wrong) in the next installments.

2010 in Review

2011-01-01T19:52:00.000-05:00

In following last year's Award Winning post, this is 2010 in review. Probably the biggest change this year was officially getting back into Lego after something like 20 years of not doing much with it. This culminated in a trip to Brick Fair at which I won an award. The Lego action was, naturally, punctuated by a number of excellent beers and heavy drinking.

Massachusetts Can Bite Me
I wasn't really a fan of Virginia and I really hated Maryland, but Massachusetts is giving Maryland a real good run for its money. This place is way too goddamned expensive, and everyone here seems to be woefully self-absorbed. Given that my place of employ has moved much closer to Boston proper, I now have to take a much busier route to go to/from work and I'm convinced that my chances of dying in a traffic crash are now several hundred times higher. Note: they were not low before. People here really can't drive for shit; must be an east coast thing.

Probably the only redeeming factor of where I live is having three Lego stores within driving distance--assuming I don't die on the way there or back, mind you.

Fun With Lego
One of the side effects of not crunching like crazy is that I've had a lot more time to pursue different hobbies, the most time consuming of those (so far) is building with Lego again. If you haven't seen my flickr stream, you should go go there right now. It's OK, I'll wait. Unbeknownst to me (though I really should have figured) there's a huge online Lego builder community and I've been able to pick up a lot of fun techniques from them. It all came to a frothy head at Brick Fair in August. It was very cool and not just because I won a trophy. I'm hoping I can get back there next year and am in the very early stages of building a presentable piece. Wish me luck!

Gaming
Other than Lego (and drinking) I played a lot of games, some of which were very good. Most notably, I finally broke down and bought an Xbox360. This is largely because my PS3 was bricked by one of Sony's firmware flashes which killed the Blu-ray drive. I got the PS3 as a gift so I suppose I shouldn't be so pissy about the $150 they want to replace the drive, but it's the principle of the thing. Anyway...

Torchlight: ***
Recommended by a bunch of people so I picked it up. It's a very pretty Diablo-like hack&slash kind of game that looks a lot like World of Warcraft. This isn't a coincidence since it's a lot of the same developers. I sort of view it as a distraction--pretty with nice explosions but lacking any real depth.

Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter: ***

Serious Sam is usually my first rebuttal when people say "you can't just make a doom-like shooter anymore" which has been en vogue since Half Life first came out which I guess makes it old-skool. This is the same as the original game only polished up for the current generation. As it turns out, the intervening eight years have encompassed a lot of technologies! It's pretty much the same game as I remembered only I'm a lot older and slower. My aim isn't what it was and even then it wasn't all that. I'd probably rate it higher if I had retained more of my FPS skills but I found it to be very frustrating in places.

Mass Effect 2: *****
Bioware seems to have fixed most of the major issues (stupid inventory system, maddening difficulty curve, etc.) but seem to have left some of the awesome on the cutting room floor. I was hoping to get through the game again now that I've picked up all the DLCs but dumping half a diet coke into the gaming rig kind of puts the skids on that. The short: some things streamlined very well, some things streamlined too much, and some pretty awful plot points. You can read all about it on them thare intarwebs so I won't rehash, though I'm hoping that ME3 strikes a happier balance.

Knights of the Old Republic: *****
OK, so Mass Effect is pretty awesome but it's the first of the Bioware games I'd played. Let's fix that! KoTOR was the next one and holy crap, I'm sad I missed this when it first came out. The graphics haven't aged well but the story holds up exceptionally. It's got some very memorable characters (HK-47, Mission Vao, Bastilla Shan) and probably the best plot twist in all of gaming. Definitely one of the best RPGs I've played.

Knights of the Old Republic 2: ***, **** w/mods
I mean, why not? Unbeknownst to me, Obsidian has quite the reputation for starting big but ending flat on their projects which is probably why I had such a hard time finding a copy. The beginning of the game is exceptional from the twisting plotlines to the character development. The ending of the game is a travesty where most of the interesting bits are dropped on the floor and the opportunity lost. Luckily, the fan community has come to the rescue with a number of mods that make the game seem a little more complete. I have to wonder how awesome the game would have been if it had been released in a more completed state.

Bioshock: ***
I'm late to the party as usual. It's a pretty good shooter with some interesting plot points, but overall I wasn't all that thrilled with it. There really needed to be more reason to use the other plasmids and I never had enough ammo. It was very pretty but it was also frustratingly dark a lot of the time. I'll probably grab the sequel at some point, but I'm not in any huge hurry. Interesting fourth wall busting.

Supreme Commander 2: ***
As much of a Supreme Commander fanboi as I might be, Supreme Commander 2 really didn't do it for me. It really lacked the depth of the first and the single player campaign had a very brittle twist. I played the campaign through, did a couple skirmishes, and really didn't give it more thought than that. Very sad-making

Vanguard: *****
Very few people played Vanguard at release. I caught it about six months in and it was already on its way out. This summer, my MMO "friends" decided to pick it back up again and I have to say that it's still all that and a bag of chips. On good hardware most of the perf bugs are gone and the game has been somewhat streamlined from the bad old days but it still has most of the depth it had the last time I played. Alas, it isn't really a solo game and since my "friends" stranded me there...again....it didn't make sense to keep the sub up. Vanguard is really the last of a dying breed: the involved MMO--the kind I really like. It's sad that there aren't more like it being made and even more sad that I can't find reliable people to play with. Vanguard remains the only MMO that I really want to play more of but can't. It remains one of the best MMOs that no one plays.

Minecraft: *****

If you've escaped the torrential flood of Minecraft on the intartoobs, you must be living under a rock or something. It's a spiffy little game that is terribly addictive hitting all the magic buttons of "exploration", "building", and "abject terror". The exploration bit is well played by a very organic terrain/cave generation system. Even in its unapologetic blockyness the generated landscapes can be very beautiful. Just about everything in the world is rearrangeable and people have built some very nifty structures. The part of "abject terror" is played by monsters sneaking up behind you and then hearing "....sssssssssss***BOOOM****" as it explodes stranding your nifty diamond equipment a billion miles away, doomed to decay before you can get back to collect it. Pretty amazing game, all things said, and it well deserves all the publicity it's getting.

Civ V: ****
Terribly broken in a lot of ways, but still the same old Civ in others. I'm a little more forgiving than many due to having gotten an unexpected credit on it (I did work on it, just not for very long). I think the game is less strategically interesting than, say, Civ IV, but the tactical combat is a lot more interesting. I played a bunch of it, found the One True Path To Victory, and then promptly lost interest. I'm a little disappointed that it could bring my beefy gaming box (RIP) to its knees.

Halo: Reach: ***
This is actually what made me buy a 360, finally. I am an unabashed fan of the original Halo on the original Xbox. I played the crap out of it. Halo 2 was kind of a letdown--on top of being very short, it seemed to leave the story in a really crappy place. In the intervening, what, five years there's been a lot of Halo on systems I didn't have, so when the reviews of Reach started rolling in saying that it was a spiritual successor to the original, I had to pick it up. The good: pretty much just like the original Halo in regards to gameplay. The bad: pretty much just like the original Halo in regards to gameplay. The weapons feel "right" which is nice, but it has the typical trope of going through an area one direction and then back through the same area in the other direction at a later point. It also suffered from Halo's typical "there's way more going on than I get during the game" which kind of sucks. There's soooo much backstory that it's sad that they don't deem to show us more of it. Also, as a particular bad point, none of the other spartans on your team seem all that interesting--sort of cardboard cutouts that die one at a time to mark your progression through the game. Enjoyable, if dated, but it really left me wanting more.

Halo: ODST: ****
After Reach, I didn't really have high hopes for ODST which is probably why I liked it so much. It was short, like Reach, but had much better storytelling. The game is mostly character based with you picking up the roles of various people in your squad and it was fun to see part of how it tied into the events of Halo 3. I thought it was, anyway, until I played Halo 3 and saw how tangential it all was. So I suppose I like the tie-ins that I made up in my head rather than the ones that were actually in the game. Still, a very enjoyable playthrough, if a bit short.

Halo 3: ****
I really did play them in this order. It turned out to be pretty difficult to get Halo 3 which I didn't expect. I don't know if it's because I've been playing so many Bioware games or what, but I thought that the storytelling kind of fell flat in Halo 3. A lot of it seemed very sudden and most of the big events were all too predictable. I'm also kind of let down by the ending.

Red Faction: Guerilla: ****
This one is sort of a love/hate thing for me. On the one hand, this is the guy that bricked my PS3. On the other hand, having been lent it for the X360 and actually been able to play it, it's a really fun game. I don't know why it flew so low on the radar because it has a lot of really awesome things: fun driving, fun shooting, and being able to destroy just about anything in the world. Building in the way? No problem! In fact, the hardest part is deciding whether you want to run your vehicle through it, kill it with explosive charges, or (my personal favorite) go to town on it with your trusty sledge. Decisions, decisions!

So there you have it, 2010 in review.

So As It Turns Out...

2010-12-07T23:53:00.000-05:00

...only the video card was dead. In retrospect, I should have tested that first, but I'm super surprised that nothing else was dead.

This is Why I Hate Putting Gear on the Floor

2010-12-04T17:46:00.000-05:00

The scene: my "living" room near the computer desk. The setup: half a bottle of warm diet coke sitting perilously on the computer desk and a very expensive very fast machine on the floor below. The action: bobble the half filled bottle of warm diet coke which, while capped, falls and spews all over the machine. The aftermath: one very dead machine.

So now four hours later I've got my data back off of it and the 500GB drive installed in the old machine and lots of stuff backed up. Nothin' like a tragedy to kick the backup reflex into high gear.

$%&*!%&*!!!

Could have been worse, I suppose. The most expensive part (the solid state drive) is still OK but at the very least, it looks like the motherboard and video card are toasted. The other bad thing is that the CPU and the power supply may also be toasted but it's harder for me to test those. Soooooo....it looks like I'm spending more money at newegg. My hope is that I can get bits and pieces fast enough to get the thing working by the holiday, but I suppose that hinges entirely on how many bits and pieces are broken.

Bleh.

Friendly Note to New England Drivers...

2010-11-23T18:10:00.000-05:00

...if you're following close enough that I could be mistaken for towing you, you may be too close.

That is all.

And Now, a Rant From Our Sponsors

2010-11-06T04:03:00.003-04:00

I'd say that few things get me into a ranting mood but that'd be a bald-faced lie. Instead, I'll pick one thing that sent me into a frothy rage last week and go from there.

If you aren't familiar with The Escapist, it's generally a pretty good gaming-oriented site with a bunch of usually-reasonably-well-thought-out articles and home to the terribly amusing Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation fame. (In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if half their traffic is directly attributable to ZP.) So last week while waiting for a (terribly long) compile I pop over there to see what's what, and I find this: Open Letter to People Who Make Games as penned by Russ Pitts. It's not a long read, but if you, like me, have ever spent time in the Biz, you'll get good and frothy too. Feel free to read it if you like (I'll wait), but I'll sum it up: the game industry is doomed because game people suck. One particular quote really sent me off the deep end:

I know that some of you take this seriously enough to devote your working hours making these games right, making patches and fixes that will resolve your players' issues. I know that some of you work overtime on this. I know you lose money. I know it sucks for you. And yet, I don't care.

This is indicative of the kind of entitlement that the general public has that is particularly maddening. If you've heard about the jackasses who did a DOS attack on Minecraft because they weren't happy with Notch's speed of updates then you know exactly what I'm talking about. I could probably link a bunch of other similar things but I won't bore you with that. Instead, I'll bore you with a bunch of my observations across five companies and more than a decade of professional game development.

Let's start here: No one in the Biz wants to ship a shitty game. I don't care about your hypotheticals about evil execs and pernicious designers, none of the untold hundreds of people I've worked with personally have ever set out to build a game that sucks all ass, ever. It's just not part of the culture which is why I have no issue making such a blanket statement. Most games are released before they're ready which is part of what Russ's rant is about but that's largely decided by execs and money guys; you know, the stuffed suits that make the real money.

Why is that? Well, because it's a business. That business would be making as much money for investors as possible and that means shipping the most things with the most appeal at the most opportune times. Hardcore gamers just looooove to whine about how everything is getting dumbed down. This isn't a coincidence. The economics of the thing is that if you need a budget of $30M (small to middling these days; giant when I started in the Biz) you have to sell about a bajillion copies to break even. Sorry. That's just the way it is if you want your spiffy art at a decent framerate. So the industry as a whole tries to open up any given game to the widest audience possible even if it means knocking off all the gnarly corners that us old-timers really loved. Usually this is stuff like "approachability" and "accessibility" and probably a bunch of other "ibilities" that escape me at the moment.

The "opportune times" bit also comes with baggage. Everyone who's ever worked on software knows that software projects pretty much always run long; sometimes way long if they even ship at all. This is super bad when you start talking about fixed schedules like we almost always have, i.e., we mostly ship around the holidays. How fixed these schedules may actually be tends to never be as fixed as management would make them seem to be which is part of why at most companies people crunch like fucking corn flakes most of the year. The best part? A lot of the time your reward for being a hero is getting laid off at the end of the project!

Software people outside the Biz understand a lot of this. No plan is ever as complete as the Suits would like and no plan ever survives first contact with the ~~enemy~~ schedule. In the greater software world this is generally understood which is why stuff like Agile is such a big deal. If you can't adjust the ship date, then you'd better be able to adjust one or both of { budget | feature set } otherwise, well, in the immortal words of one Adam Savage: "Failure is always an option".

In the Biz, teams which can actually affect quality directly almost never have control over any corner. Our ship date is fixed and most times pushed inward due to certification checks and manufacturing, our feature set is largely fixed because it's part of what the Suits want to market (not that they wouldn't change their minds midway through a project and mandate said changes without adjusting schedules or budgets or anything), and as a kicker, the same Suits who fix the ship date also fix the budget. Each of these things from a business point of view is sensical but it means that there's never enough of anything on a given project and you're usually short two if not all of the three.

Software is a pretty young art (almost certainly not a science despite what my two fancy, expensive pieces of paper say) and the greater industry is still wrestling with its care and nurture. The Games Biz is even younger and seems to be so heads-down that we can't even effectively learn from the larger body of experience that the software biz has. Why is this? Our management tends to be inexperienced. I've had maybe two or three managers that didn't outright suck over a couple dozen of them and I don't think I've ever met a reasonable exec. Real Managers (TM) don't often show up in game dev because pay is so comparatively low and hours are so comparatively crappy. Managers, unlike artists, designers, or programmers, don't grow up wanting to make games--at least, I haven't met any good ones that have at this point in time.

And wouldn't that be just like a disgruntled worker-cog to pin the blame solely on management? Probably, but our worker-cogs tend to be inexperienced too. We turn over something like 20% of our workforce every year. Other than college sports rosters, I don't know of any group that does that and remains competitive. (Maybe we're only competitive because most of our peers are doing it too.) Most people burn out after a few years. It turns out that crappy working environments + long hours + looming layoffs + lower than average pay is way greater than the idealism that drives most people to get into the Biz in the first place. But, as it turns out, this is kind of what drives a lot of studios because for every one of us that falls there are ten bright eyed kids that would do the job for free. Never mind the fact that only a few of these kids will statistically stick around for more than a few years or that exceptionally few of them are actually qualified to do what you need them to do. I've been on more than a few teams that bulked up during the painful phases of a project with a bunch of junior people who made the entire thing generally much harder. It's almost as if we should know better by now. This is part of why studios go through the hire/fire/re-hire cycles and part of why salaries are so comparatively low.

So, OK, Mr. Pitts:

When I play a game that you have made, and which is broken, I ask myself the question: Which is it with you? Did you not know that your game had problems, or did you know and decide to ship it anyway? I hope you can understand that either way we have a problem. Actually, the problem is mostly yours.

I'm really not sure who he thinks his audience is. I sure as hell don't decide when the thing goes out. I don't think I've shipped a title that I didn't wish I had more time to fix. Maybe Suits read this stuff. Either way, most games don't ship in as broken a state as he seems to imply. All software has bugs. I dislike buggy games as much as the next guy (actually, probably way more than the next guy) but to reiterate: no one wants to ship a shitty game. Want to send a real message, one that will be way more meaningful than a snarky plea? Stop buying games you think are broken. Bonus points if you don't give a broken game a buy recommendation. Tell the Suits that this just isn't good enough and maybe they'll start getting us worker-cogs enough resources to build better games. Seems pretty simple, right?

You will be the one who has made a game that is so bad I can't actually play it. You will have failed at your only job, tomake a game. Worse, you will have contributed to the depression of your industry. You may be putting yourself and people you know out of a job.

News flash for you, buddy: I'm probably out of a job either way. Ship a million copies or miss a ship date, it doesn't really matter. The economics just plain don't scale and most companies just plain don't care about the people they employ either way. The typical work agreement is that they can fire me at any time without cause! That's right, kids, you're just a cog and they don't even need a reason to kick your ass out the door. That's just part of the cost of following The Dream. Apparently another part of it is suffering fools who really ought to know better.

BrickFair 2010

2010-08-11T19:34:00.000-04:00

As you might have surmised from my last post, I attended BrickFair 2010 in Chantilly, VA. I was originally just going to visit on one of the public days and hang with some old co-workers, but ended up staying for a number of days and showing some pieces instead. On the right is a very fuzzy picture of the five MOCs I brought. It amuses (and dismays) me that just about every third party picture of my stuff I've seen is far and away better than any picture I've ever taken of them. There may be a new camera in my future.

The Normandy was nominated for two categories and won "Best Sci-Fi" against some very good builds. A very fuzzy picture of the trophy is on the right (also in the center of the above). I certainly didn't expect to win anything but I'm super happy that I did. It sort of legitimizes the last five months of frantic buying/building--not that I need any legitimizing, mind you.

It was good times. I met a lot of cool people who I only previously knew from their work and online names. I was very impressed by all the sweet builds many of which were way cooler in person than in photos. It's a good show and run by a bunch of awesome people. With any luck, I'll be back next year.

A Funny Thing Happened At BrickFair Today...

2010-08-07T22:40:00.000-04:00

So picture this. I'm showing off the Normandy in an almost incessant crush of people when I hear a familiar voice...

Flashback to 2003 and I'm leaving my first job. I'm interviewing with the man who would later hire me. It's the dead of winter in a freak Virginia snowstorm. He's wearing a Hawaiian shirt and is walking around in sandals. "Is it cold enough for you?", was his first question.

Sure enough, it's my old boss standing there with his family who I've never met. I worked for him for two years before parting ways and he had no idea who I was. I told him my name (twice) and it still didn't dawn on him. I told him I worked form him at XXXX company and the lightbulb finally went off.

Filed under "I'm glad I didn't need a reference".

Why? Because I Can.

2010-05-23T14:19:00.004-04:00

This is why I never eat in my dining room. There's too much firepower there!

In Other News

2010-04-19T18:43:00.001-04:00

I've finally gotten around to uploading my Champions Online vid. You can find it here. Enjoy the explodey goodness!

Got Turian?

2010-04-17T15:11:00.005-04:00

First year in Massachusetts: sick 4 times in 4 months. Year 2 started out better...until last week when I finally succumbed to the cold that went around the office. Seriously, everyone in my immediate area got sick about two weeks ago. I went all of PAX without getting sick but due to the insanity that is our HR policy of shared PTO and vacation, EVERYONE comes in sick. On the bright side, I took a day off and missed some office drama (yay) and did some building.

This is a Turian frigate from Mass Effect. I've been wanting to build one of these guys for a while but since you only ever see them a couple times in two games, I never had proper reference. A couple hours spelunking in the ME game folder and voila! Viewable models. Hacking does, in fact, sometimes pay.

One of the things that's been keeping me from building a hero-sized SR1 (other than lack of skill and bricks...and laziness) is a complete lack of experience building large models. It didn't seem like a complicated build on the whole when I started, but "50 inches long" didn't seem big either until I got the keel down.

I'm fairly pleased with how it turned out though it didn't seem like it ever would. There are a pile of hacks to make it work but it's fairly solid in spite of them. I wouldn't swoosh it around the room but I'm not dreading transporting it to the kitchen for final photographing either (I mean, come on, it's right in front of the TV).

All told, it's about 50 hours of work but that includes a lot of futzing around with stuff. Every piece that hangs off at an angle (as in: everything but the keel) was rebuilt multiple times to get a) the angles right, and b) the structure such that it wouldn't fall apart if my neighbors upstairs stomp around.

I've probably got two or three Mass Effect related builds left in me before it's run its course. I'll probably finish on the hero-sized SR1 which will hopefully be spectacular.

Edit: glam shots + final adjustments can be found here.

I Still Suck at Colors

2010-03-15T21:03:00.003-04:00

Someday I'll get it sorted out...some day...

WIP

2010-03-14T20:46:00.003-04:00

Been arting again. Hope to continue for a while. In a feeble attempt to post more, here's a WIP.

Alyssa is one of my (many) characters from Mass Effect as seen in ME1.

Because You Can Never Have Too Much Lego

2010-02-27T15:09:00.004-05:00

In preparation for doing bigger and more complicated builds, I've done a couple warmups with (probably) a couple more on the way. This way I can justify my many trips to the Lego store. For whatever reason, blogspot isn't letting me directly link my pictures (lame) so if you want the full effect, hit my Flickr account which is right here. The backgrounds notes for ship classes etc. are for an ongoing project.

When I build these, I generally have a rough idea of what I want but not a lot of details. Sometimes I doodle some rough ideas on notecards, almost always in pen (so I'm not tempted to erase & rework). I try to keep the general idea to a couple of phrases.

Andraghi Jackal class destroyer

An Andraghi destroyer built out of bits of a Terran battlecruiser. Originally I wanted to build the entire battlecruiser but dropped the idea pretty quickly for the Andraghi warship which I thought was way more interesting.

The general idea was a "golden age of space" kind of style with no obvious symmetry. I also wanted to mess more with with n-sided wall constructions (in this case, 5). The engines and con boom didn't really come through in the pictures and the build was a little fragile. I'll probably do another hermit-crab like Andraghi ship in the near future because it was hella fun.

Kestrel class light cruiser

When I think "battlecruiser" the image that my mind conjures up is almost invariably either the Space Battlecruiser Yamato or an Imperial Star Destroyer. The Terran Confederation is the benefactor of those associations for better or worse. For this model, I wanted to work at a smaller scale and since I've always envisioned the Terran Confederation to use tri-turrets, that meant I had to build some teeny-tiny gun batteries. I'd be happier with them if they elevated and were a little less fiddly, but they look OK.

The benefit of building at that scale is that I can take advantage of the nice angled pieces I've been picking up. The down side is that most of the nice angled pieces I've got are now white and maroon which aren't my first choices (grey with blue highlights would be much more appropriate). So, um, it must be ceremonial colors then, right? Riiight....

The conning tower and windowed areas are unconvincing but I didn't have blue or grey transparent slopes. The nose isn't secured properly either, but the overall feel of the ship is what I was after: a symmetric and clean hull with a stark and angular engine section.

SR1

2010-02-15T19:17:00.004-05:00

In case you hadn't figured it out, I'm a big fan of Mass Effect. The jury still seems to be out on whether ME2 is a "real RPG" or not (whatever that means) but I don't think it actually matters despite what the pundits might think. It's a great game with some great storytelling in a universe that's well realized and brought to life in one of the best presentations that this generation of hardware can deliver. Mass Effect isn't just a great not-quite-complete trilogy of games, it's great science fiction and Bioware doesn't shy away from tackling some of the big-ticket themes.

In case you hadn't figured it out, I also love Legos. In fact, I've dropped more than I'd like to consider on them this extended weekend. Massachusetts is, in fact, blessed with not one, but THREE Lego stores, two of which I visited. If you like Legos and don't want to mine them yourself in the hallowed plastic mines of Denmark, I can think of no better pilgrimage than visiting one of their centers of rampant consumerism.

You can probably already see where this is going. If not, turn on your images.

This is a fairly rookie attempt at modelling the SR1 in all of its pre-disintegrated glory. I do like the SR2 (leather seats!) but it lacks the spartan charm of the SR1. I was sad to see it go.

Sadly, I'm not super pleased with this rendition mostly because of the shape of the fuselage but I'm fairly limited in the scope that I can build by the available parts in my collection. My repeated trips to Lego stores this weekend (three trips to two different stores, in case you're wondering) might have something to do with said collection.

Lame excuses aside, it's by far the most technical of the (admittedly small number of) builds I've done. The wings are set at a very un-lego like angle both from front to back, and from top to bottom. The bottom thruster sub-assemblies are pretty sturdily attached to the wings with technic pegs. The (poorly executed) fuselage is a five walled construction. During its construction over the last six days (~40 hours) I've tried tons of different builds for just about every piece before settling on the build that you see pictured here.

Since I started, I've learned that there's an entire set of builders out there that are nothing less than phenomenal. They've gathered a palette of skills that are astounding. I've also learned that there are uses for pieces that I didn't even know existed (both the pieces, and the uses). So now, armed with a Lego VIP card and the ability to hit two separate stores in the same hour, I'm embarking on a quest to hone my Lego building skills to the point that I can build the Normandy in a more proper scale in a way that I'm pleased with.

It's a Crazy World We Live In

2010-01-24T20:27:00.002-05:00

So I'm watching the New Orleans vs. Minnesota game; one that I'm kind of torn on. On the one hand, I'm a Brett fan, but on the other hand, I wouldn't mind seeing Brees and the Saints in the Big Game (TM). (And yes, I can call him by his first name since I lived in Madison for two years.) Anyway, football isn't what I'm here to talk about, not directly anyway, so feel free to breathe a sigh of relief.

Mass Effect 2 is one of the few games that I've ever really looked forward to (the other one: Supreme Commander). How much? Well, I just got through the game for a fourth time this weekend in preparation to transfer a high level character over. I started on Thursday. I'll probably play through again delaying my ME2 extravaganza in order to hit 60 because apparently you get more awesomeness if you transfer a 60. Since then, I've been watching football and Mass Effect trailers/videos most of the day.

ANYWAY

In the middle of the game there was a Mass Effect 2 commercial. "Wow", I'm thinking. "Is gaming finally mainstream enough that we can advertise during football?" Heavy. I mean, football is usually dominated by unmemorable beer and truck commercials. Imagine my surprise then to hear "the Mass Effect 2 first half stats" as announced by Troy Aikman (maybe Joe Buck?) indicating that EA's marketing campaign is spending big $$$s. That's cool, and not just because I'm excited about the game.

Ya know what? I hate EA. I hate them a LOT, and not just for what they did/are doing to one of my former employers. Even given that, I don't think I can deny that what they're doing helps bring legitimacy to the industry. That, in many ways, is cool.

2009 in Review

2010-01-04T19:21:00.005-05:00

I'm not really one for "end of the year" type stuffs despite what the record on this blog might attest to, but I figured I'd do a year in review nonetheless. This may or may not have to do with a new machine on the way and my Champions sub ending yesterday. So without further ado, this is my 2009 in review.

New Digs
Probably the biggest change was a change of venue at the very beginning of the year. In fact, exactly one year and two days ago. This came with a 400 mile displacement to the northeast, fewer responsibilities (read: hours), and a hefty increase in pay. These are good things. What's not so good is that MA is terribly expensive and while I like the city of Boston, I'm pretty sure there's a special place in Hell being reserved for the area's drivers. If history is any indication, I'm good here for another year.

Modding
To set the scene: I'm in a new and unfamiliar town poor and tired for the moving experience. Is there a more perfect time to catch up on gaming? I think not! Dungeon Siege 2 + expansion were OK--I was happy enough to finish them anyway. Then a new co-worker recommended a tiny indie game involving swinging swords from horsebacks onto unsuspecting peasants. Well, sign me up! Mount & Blade is an excellent game which can usually be had for a steal. It's got some interesting mechanics, but...well parts of it just don't seem right. The good news is that it can be modded!

Taleworlds built the game with a fairly powerful scripting language and have in fact built most of the game logic in it. To anyone with some time, an interest in fixing/extending the game's features, and a bent to programming, just about anything is possible. I sunk a good three months into it and was fairly pleased with the results. Now retired, I'm hoping that their upcoming multiplayer expansion is cool enough to catch my interest again.

Diet
This is a controversial one, mostly because the conventional "wisdom" has been drummed into us for so long. I've been doing the paleo diet which is mostly the same as Atkins but also shuns the hyper-processed badness which pervades our ubiquitous mega-marts. If you want to know more about it, I'm sure you can find it if your google-fu is righteous.

Atkins worked for me; it worked really well but ultimately I'd get stuck in a crunch or get stressed out about something and that'd be the end of it. There was also the horrible crashes I'd get during the first couple weeks which I couldn't stand. With this diet, whether it be placebo effect or not, I have had none of these issues and the results have been dramatic.

All told, minus (plus?) the holiday inspired overeating that transpired the last couple weeks, I'm still about 45 pounds lighter than I was in April when I started. That's about 215 right now which is lighter than I've been since undergrad. To make it all the more astounding, most of the weight was lost within the first month and I did it specifically without exercising. The lack of exercise had nothing to do with being lazy (nothing at all).

I could go on about how much better I feel or how my health markers have improved across the board, but I'll leave you with the following thoughts:
- I eat 1.2 steaks per week (on average)
- I can eat bacon any time I want

Cruisin'

I was not a fan of Maryland. In fact, I'm on record proclaiming such things as "I couldn't get out of that goddamn state fast enough." While I'm not a huge fan of Massachusetts either, I will say that the area I live in (right around Gilette Stadium) has some great driving roads. Now that I can drive it without the threat of stalling at every light, it's a heck of a lot more fun.

Gaming
I mentioned the gaming briefly but I'll rate some of the highlights. Some of these are a couple years old but I hadn't gotten around to them yet. These are listed more or less in the order I played them.

Dungeon Siege 2: ***
The Good: the same basic gameplay as Dungeon Siege 1. Simple levels, well-written stories, and linear dungeons.
The Bad: kind of repetitive, just like Dungeon Siege 1. For those wondering, I did like DS1, but apparently I've become less patient in my older age.

Dungeon Siege 2 Broken World: **
The Good: some interesting new gear, some interesting new stories
The Bad: kinda threw out the old stories from DS2 which I thought were pretty good. Seems like it was done by a completely different set of people who didn't honor the original material. This was made all the more striking for me by playing one right after the other.

Mount & Blade: ***, **** with modding
The Good: awesome sandbox gameplay and unmatched mounted combat simulation. The melee simulation is OK, but not substantial. Huge array of mods.
The Bad: no real "win" condition; shallow roleplaying depth.
Notes: because the game is so flexible, most of the shortcomings can be modded away.

Mass Effect: ****
The Good: well-realized universe with believable characters. Even the ones you're not supposed to like are awesome (Wrex4tw!)

The Bad: maddening difficulty curve
Notes: ME2 is probably the game I'm most looking forward to this year and it's out in a couple weeks (woot!)

Champions Online: ****
The Good: some of the best combat mechanics in any MMO I've played. Extremely customizable costumes--look awesome from level 1!

The Bad: questionable design direction, facepalm level bugs, extremely hostile community
Notes: If there weren't a great game poking out of the badness, I'd probably be less bitter about Champions. The fact remains that they had a great product and almost completely botched it. It's like a Hail Mary that hits the receiver in the hands but lands on the turf. Maybe in a year it'll be better, but I have very little faith left for Cryptic.

Dragon Age Origins: *****
The Good: probably the most polished game I've ever played. It's exactly what I expected out of the leading RPG house with the hype machine of EA behind it.

The Bad: maddening difficulty curve. No good endings. Gratuitous DLC pandering.
Notes: if you like RPGs and haven't played this one, it's well worth it. I'm not kidding about the "no good endings" bit, either. It's super easy to get attached to the characters in the game and even easier to feel bad when bad things (invariably) happen to them.

Champions: Possible Fixes

2009-10-22T19:44:00.003-04:00

As I'm in a particularly giving mood, I thought I'd give some parting thoughts on Champions and what they can do to improve it. For all I know, they're already doing some of this in which case I will claim sole credit for those ideas. You can thank me later.

Fix PvP
IMO, it wouldn't take much to fix, really. I'll outline it in four easy steps:
1) Reduce holds/roots/misc effects (like crippling challenge) on players so you can't get completely locked down by one guy. Add immunity timers if you like.
2) Base credit on a threat-like calculation rather than damage so support actually gets something for their efforts.
3) Fix some of the more obviously broken powers like Teleport (still) and Mindful Reinforcement and, I dunno, take your pick of other crap.
4) Refactor the rewards so that PvPers aren't totally down shit creek for playing and enjoying that aspect of your game exclusively.

Beating this into shape really shouldn't take that long if their system isn't stupidly complex or fragile. Cause not like game systems ever are like that or anything.

Add More Missions
More Nemesis stuff, more UNITY missions (preferrably more than the same dozen or so that keep getting repeated now), and more story arcs would all be well received. If I don't have to do every single quest, it opens up a lot more options for people re-rolling because they can't afford retcons. "I did 1-30 in Canada on this guy, so let me do 1-30 in the Desert on the next guy."

I suspect this will get fixed with time. Bloodmoon is right around the corner which is a step in the right direction, but I suspect it arrives too late for a majority of the folks who have already jumped ship.

Fix Teaming
One of the fallouts at the confluence of badness in CO, is that people aren't sticky. In a game where every character can be a tank-mage-cleric, people almost never group up. Despite the fact that people will bemoan miserably (myself included) "required grouping", it is good for your game in the long run. If people don't build lasting associations between each other, the game easily becomes a single player game with annoying NPCs that can just as easily be put back down. You don't want to let your buddies down. Many people will stick out a bad situation longer if they're in it with their chums.

Fixes:
- Increase exp while teaming (currently it splits which makes it stupidly low)
- Fix threat (already in the works--see, I can take credit for that already!)
- Add More 5-Person Content

Add More 5-Person Content
I maintain that Cryptic knows how to make compelling encounters. They need more of this--a LOT more. And now that they have a pile of data on how people actually play the game, they can do a lot more with increasing difficulties. If it requires a reasonable 5-person team to complete more than a handful of compelling stuff, then there's reason for people to form longer-lasting relationships which, as asserted above, is a win for the game long-term.

I would think that a set of five really challenging new L42 missions (like Mandragalore and Andrith) would be enough. Make them sequentially harder. Make them keyed off one another for all I care, just put them in there so PvE minded folks have something to look forward to until you raise your level cap/add your next big free expansion/whatever. Challenge the people with uber solo builds to change them to be more group friendly. Give people a reason to explore the interaction between different powers amongst your group (auras anyone?) and you will give folks a reason to stick around.

This does require a pretty substantial change, however:

Make End-Game Rewards Worthwhile
No one but the most completionist minded people are going to grind UNITY gear the way it is now. It's 250 points for each of 6 secondary slots and 1000 points for each of 3 primary slots. You can get *maybe* ten UNITY merits a day. That isn't going to cut it. Furthermore, people aren't going to grind the UNITY missions just to get to Mandragalore and Andrith when both are bugged if they also don't have drops/quests/whatevers worth grinding for. There is zero reason to have the three crystal requirement for a one time use key to get into one of these. None. I'll negotiate this point when the stupid bugs get fixed and the loot becomes worthwhile--but not a moment sooner!

Add Decent Crafting
We already get (randomly) a tiny number of super uber awesome things to craft with from our daily UNITY missions but can't do anything with those. We stockpile these in the hopes that they actually do something with them which I have no doubt they will. These have to be worthwhile no matter what happens. If the crafting rewards are worthwhile, people have another reason to grind UNITY missions so long as the mountain isn't too high. That puts it past the tipping point: "oh, I can run and get a handful of UNITY badges which is kind of lame but I really want the Q. Essences so I can craft my Boots of Uber Sexy by the end of the week!" Yes, I think that would be enough.

As the inimitable Kruunch points out, if they don't have a fire lit under them right now, they need one and in a hurry. The longer it goes without being fixed, the more subs they're going to hemorrhage. Even though I'm probably throwing in the towel soon, I hope they get it straightened out.

Champions: The Ugly

2009-10-18T11:59:00.003-04:00

That's right, kids, I can't do one of these without an "Ugly" post. So here it is, and it's not pretty. Look away if you must.

The Cryptic Live Team
I'm at a loss to recall a company that has fielded a live team as poor as Cryptic. I say this remembering the foibles of DAoC (some of them my own), the disaster that was Vanguard, or the tremendously disappointing Age of Conan. City of Heroes was a live team disaster and Champions follows eagerly in its footsteps.

And what precisely do I mean by "live team". Typically when an MMO ships, sometimes a number of months after, there's some shifting around. At some point you need to be thinking about the next Big Thing (TM) and that means rolling off some of your key personnel from the last Big Thing (TM). This leaves a number of designers, QA, GMs, whatevers. This is also when you get the best and most useful data about how the unwashed masses actually play your game. Typically this goes with "adjustments" which the same unwashed masses refer to as "nerfs".

Cryptic has done the worst job I have ever seen of rebalancing their games. The Cryptic I remember from CoH had Invuln tanks hiding in dumpsters because they couldn't take the alpha strikes from minions and lieutenants. Think about that. Invuln tank...hiding in trash cans...because they can't take the alpha strikes. Sure, they may have gotten it right later, but how did they miss that?

Following in their own footsteps, at one point a few weeks ago, they "accidentally" doubled the damage for all mobs in the live game. Wait! Was this an ops bug? Did someone bobble a merge? No! It was broken on their public test server for an entire week. Did no one report it there? No! It was reported pretty much as soon as people logged in there! How did that go live? Who dropped that ball?

How about some of their big nerfs?

Teleporters can get out of any jam through status effects and at a sliver of health in a way that you can't shoot at them. This made them unkillable in PvP. Do you think that breaks the competitiveness? Do you think that makes TP a must have for PvP? The fix? Make them not able to teleport out of status effects. Now they're only nigh unto unkillable.

How about mini-mines which was doing 4x too much damage. Four times too much damage? Really? How did this not get caught in beta?

How bout Mindful Reinforcement that is a shield that heals the target for an amount proportional to the shield remaining after some short period of time. Sounds great, right? How bout when it's broken to the point that it drops a 2500 point heal on the target even if the shield is broken? Sound good? Maybe too good to be true? It's still that way on live but will almost certainly be nerfed and nerfed hard in future patches.

Their missteps are bad enough but would be mitigated greatly by players having the ability to easily rebuild characters broken by wide swings in rebalancing which brings us to retcons.

Prohibitively Expensive Respecs
Most games call the "respecs". Champions paying homage to its comic roots calls them "retcons". In Champions you pick a lot of really important things way before you really know what you're doing. It's true for me now running the tables on my third character although less so, and it's true for people starting the game for the first time. Remember that this game is a skills based system with open power selection. Remember that it is a tried and true trapping of MMOs and RPGs historically to underspecify game information. Remember that this is Cryptic that doesn't like showing numbers to players.

The problem? You have to retcon your choices in order. This includes stat picks, advantages to powers, powers themselves, travel powers, and characteristic foci (otherwise known as super stats). The cost scales with level so the higher you are, the more expensive it is and the further back you go the more expensive it is. So when you have the least amount of information you're making the most important decisions and if you make a mistake, you probably can't afford to fix it. For me, this is less of a problem because I have the backup of (now) a pair of 40s and all the cash and experience that brings. For new players? They're probably screwed.

So you step out of the powerhouse with your brand new powers that you've chosen with as much care as you can and you go out to fight. Maybe it works out well for a while; maybe it doesn't. Maybe it takes you a couple levels to realize that you really wanted X instead of Y. Well now you're screwed unless you have a sizable cash reserve. To paraphrase one of the guys I played with, it's like someone at the top had a thing for prohibitively expensive respecs.

Why Hate Healers?
I mentioned it in my last post: the game penalizes healers. Like it or not, the holy trinity (tank, healer, dps) is popular because it works. Please indulge me in a brief football analogy. You get big beefy blockers up front, you get your guys who can throw and you get your good hands guys and everything works because each player is specialized for what they do. A few special ones can do two or three things (blocking tight ends and scrambling quarterbacks for instance). MMO roles work the same way. You want your beefiest characters with their oceans of hitpoints keeping the attention of the biggest and baddest uglies and you want your guys doing damage doing as much damage as they possibly can without turning that ugly's sights on them.

In Champions, healing aggro is broken. If you drop a big heal on a tank, you will get aggro. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. You can be in the right stance, you can stack your presence so that you generate way less threat, and your tank can stack presence so they generate way more threat and it just doesn't matter. You will get aggro and unless you're also a tank, you will die.

The devs have said that it's "working as designed" but have already adjusted it down on the public test server. This is a design decision that really shouldn't have ever seen the light of day. We do betas for a reason--it's to sort stuff like this out. You couple that with the day 1 nerf ("rebalancing") of defensive passives and exp and you get a game that's really in disarray on day 1. Bad Cryptic, no Twinkie.

Healing is already a much maligned role. You need them, they need you, and you only really notice them when they fail--whether its your fault or not. The game already penalizes them by not giving PvP or PvE credit, why make it harder on those who choose that role to take one for the team?

Content Holes
I've mentioned the day 1 "rebalancing" a bunch of times already, but in an attempt to call out one of the worst live decisions I've ever witnessed, I'm going to call it out again. On that fateful day they nerfed experience as well. On paper you can get from 1 to 40 doing quests and just quests but like I mentioned before, unless you go out of your way to do every single quest or spend a lot of time in broken PvP, you end up having to grind.

I listed this issue under "The Bad" but it really goes further than that because it's at the confluence of a number of poor decisions. You get your day 1 patch which rocks people on their heels. You get your really awful cost of retcons. Now you get people having to grind in a game that's otherwise very casual friendly. The solution? Now, more than a month and a half after release, we get a set of daily repeatable grind quests some of which are terribly broken. Some of these have stupid requirements "kill 150 X" or "gather 20 X" where the drop rate means you kill the same 150 X and takes up bag space. The kicker? Some of them are broken and don't give any XP! So you're really grinding anyway and people can see right through that. [keyshawn]C'mon, man![/keyshawn]

Broken Content
The table is already set for some very frustrating gameplay and a growing ennui from at least some appreciable portion of the vocal playerbase but let's kick it up that one more notch that makes it look ever so clownshoes. I will point out but two things.

First, most of the last three 5-person instances are broken in some way. I can probably say "all" of the last three 5-person instances are broken but there's one that I've never been to that no one ever goes to. The other two, one at 38, and one at 40, are broken in pretty bad ways. The level 38 one (Viper's Lair) has bugged both times I've been there to the point that the two ending bosses did not attack me at all. That's pretty bad. The broken 40 has a broken boss that pretty much instagibs your entire team within seconds of the pull. Despite the fact that the encounter is soloable if you use some broken powers, this seems bad.

Second, in a single shard game with multiple instances, what stops a raid group from going through and killing all the big world bosses in every instance? In other games we have raid timers which keep people from farming the same bosses multiple times a day. In Champions we have a reverse raid timer. Each big world boss will put an invisible debuff on you which cannot be seen in your interface which turns at least one of each boss's AoE attacks into an unmitigated instagib. The kicker? They stick this on a number of quest mobs. So if you're helping out to kill a big bad for a buddy, you're kind of screwed when you get the quest yourself. Brilliant! Functioning as intended or not, this qualifies from a player's point of view as "broken".

Champions: The Bad

2009-10-15T19:10:00.003-04:00

Sadly, all is not well in Millenium City...

The Game Is Really Short
Between the initial draft of the intro article and now, I've not only dinged my main up to 40, but I'm within mere hours of dinging a second alt to 40. How can this be? Didn't they nerf the exp on launch day? Yes, they did and no, it doesn't really seem to slow people down that much. On my schedule, it's looking like about 120 hours from level 1 to level 40 if you don't futz around and know what you're doing. I'm sure I could do it faster if I really wanted to, but half the fun for me is trying the same encounters I already know with different builds which leads us to...

The Game Is Really Easy
Very few times have I felt that the game was legitimately challenging once I had the correct build and the correct strategy. This probably isn't a shocker unless you consider that I solo the 5-person instances and most of the world bosses. In fact, this isn't even because I have some esoteric build or some innate penchant for gaming. It's in fact pretty common for people to do this. But wait! Didn't they nerf the defensive passives at launch? But didn't they nerf half of the overpowered powers? Yes, they did, and it's still doable.

On a purely personal note, I think they should nerf a bunch of stuff, but if they do and I can no longer solo 5-person instances, it's a deal breaker for me. The jump in difficulty from 5-person instances to, I don't know, a hopped up +6 level nemesis mission is too great. I liken it to WoW in the Bad Old Days (TM) when the jump from non-raiding to raiding was UBRS to Molten Core in a day when you couldn't easily get blues in every slot. It's that pronounced. So if I can't reasonably solo a 5-person instance, the amount of content I can experience (repeatedly) that's even remotely challenging without outside intervention dwindles to nil. I.e.: deal breaker.

I can get a challenge in Champions in exactly four ways:
- solo a 5-person instance
- pull a pile of mobs which no one has a hope of dealing with because AoEs are limited to 5 targets or less
- pick a build that's hobbled in some way (yeah, right, that sounds fun)
- PvP

PvP Is Hella Broken
I love PvP (I really do). It was one of my favorite things in WoW and as far as I can tell, the only reason to play DAoC. It was OK in Conan. In Champions, it's hella broken. Let me briefly list the ways...

Status effects have no real immunity timers. Holds, stuns, snares, knockback, knockup, it all can be chained with nary a pause. This means that if you're fighting someone with a spammable status effect (and many of them are) you die. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, die right now or in the next 10 minutes if you happen to have Regeneration at a high level. Don't worry, they can keep it up indefinitely.

Healers get no credit. I'm not talking "healers get less credit" I'm talking "healers get NO credit." The entire game is like this, in fact. If you are a healer in PvP as I often try to be, you will get zero points for your contributions at all. If it was your efforts that turned the tide, tough. If it was you that kept the other team score-less, so what? You get nothing. If you don't do significant damage, you get squat and thats just the way it is. Sound broken? It is!

The dynamic range of build power is too high. In WoW, even when massively outgeared (as we usually were), I always felt that we had a chance even if it was small as long as we played better than the other team. In Champions, it seems to be mostly build. If you have a broken build and fight against other broken build teams, I imagine it's a lot more interesting but the game just plain isn't designed for it. If you bring a PvE build into PvP, even one on one you're going to get worked and there's nothing you can do about it. This compounds when you fight PvP groups who all have broken builds and pound even the most resilient of heroes into dust in seconds. No, I'm not exaggerating this.

Lack of gear/cash rewards from PvP. I probably wouldn't have noticed this except that someone else pointed it out to me. You can totally level in PvP as long as you'd like but you get almost no gear for it and you get no cash to buy new gear. You can buy a small amount of gear that might fit your needs if you PvP endlessly and don't mind the unaffordably high cost of these items but that's not really reliable now is it? This is a problem for people who couldn't care less about PvE and is yet another example of why the game isn't designed for PvP. Sorry PvPers, it just isn't.

There's Little Replay Value
Because of the XP nerf at launch, if you don't go out of your way to grind mobs or PvP, you pretty much have to do every single quest. There are indeed, on paper, enough quests to go from 1 to 40 without grinding but if you're not super uber careful about it, you can easily miss one or two levels of experience. In all of MMO-dom that I've seen, I'd have to say that the grindy bits in this game are really, really forgiving, but it stands in stark contrast to the rest of the game which is almost mind-numbingly casual.

This means that if you do bring multiple characters to 40, you will be doing a very large percentage of every quest on each and every playthrough. I expect this to change as they add more content, but at the moment, the point stands. I was going to say "no replay value" but I am playing through it with a different set of powers which is amusing to me from a wannabe designer point of view if nothing else.

No Endgame
So you've saved the world from VIPER and ARGENT and Teleios, and a spectacularly ugly menagerie of career evildoers. As you ding 40 and get your invite to the premier super heroing group cleverly named UNITY, what do you get? You get a bunch of once-per-day missions that can get you a small number of unity points like three or six. Whoa. Hold me back. If you have a small handful of these, you can buy attunement crystals to two (that's right, TWO!) level 40 5-person instances. If you have a thousand of these, you can buy some pretty nice gear. It isn't spectacularly nicer than the stuff I got to 40 in to be honest, and remember that you can only run your half dozen random missions once a day.

So...well...by next April I could buy something...

Riiiiight. Bad desginer, no twinkie. If the margins were thinner, I might be tempted to grind these damned things out, but they really are repetitive and the increase in ability just isn't that compelling.

If PvP weren't so horribly broken, or there were more interesting things to do, or the game was significantly more difficult, I probably wouldn't mind running the UNITY missions so much. But, jeez, that really seems poor. If I were in a more caring and less drunken rage, I might give them the benefit of the doubt "they're not quite finished yet" but it really seems like they didn't put any thought into this.

Here's a tip: add 5 or so 5-person instances that are really hard. I know your design team has the chops to build interesting encounters. Make the last 1% of your character count for something, and stuff these places full of interesting bosses. Put them in a chain with whatever your favorite raid instance locking mechanism is so long as I know I have some challenge to look forward to each and every time I log into the game. Give me a reason to keep sending you $15 a month because...

The Population Is Shrinking
Since there's only one server with each zone split into a handful of instances, it's relatively easy to tell roughly if the population is shifting. Because all the later levels are done primarily in two zones, it's super uber easy to compare populations just by looking at those zones. I can tell you that the top level zones are roughly half to two thirds of what they were a month ago. This corresponds frighteningly well with the end of the first month + one month trial period from launch.

I do know that both Conan and CoH had the same kind of issues. There just wasn't much to do when you hit your last level and both of these games survive today. I've got very little doubt that Champions will be around for a while, but that doesn't make me think for even a moment, that they couldn't have hit it out of the park if they'd paid a little more attention to how people actually play these kinds of games.

Champions: The Good

2009-10-06T13:27:00.005-04:00

So we'll start out with the stuff in the game that I think is particularly good. The typical disclaimers apply.

Powers
Champions is a skills based game. You pick your powers with a handful of very small restrictions and off you go. You can choose to be a glass cannon, a full support character, or the tankiest of tanks since CoH pre-invuln nerf, or something in between. Want to multi-class? Sure! Want to follow one narrow path? Sure! Want to be good at a variety of stuff? It's all right there for ya, tiger, and for most roles you'll have more than enough power choices to fill whatever loadout you'd like.

Do some combinations suck? Yeah. Are some combinations super-overpowered? Sure! Are most sensical builds viable? You betcha. Champions cleverly gives you a small zone named the Powerhouse where you can somewhat test out your new powers before you commit to them. Furthermore, reverting uncommitted powers is free so other than time constraints, there's no real reason to not pick precisely which powers you think work well. With recent additions to the Powerhouse, there are very few skills which you can't actively try before you buy. Think of it as your one stop shop for superpower test drives.

I think this is a really cool feature. Being able to customize your build to your chosen style of play at a very basic level can be empowering. We'll revisit this point further in future posts since as with most things, it's a double edged sword.

Humor
Champions is bursting at its virtual seams with campy goodness. There are pirates, ninjas, and zombies. There are cowboy robots. There are giant dinosaurs. There are disembodied floating brains. There are sharks with frikkin' lasers on their heads for cryin' out loud. I'm pretty sure you can't go for more than five minutes without a pun or a joke or something in the game, most of which are 80s and 90s pop culture references that I actually get!

While some people don't appreciate this kind of thing, I find it tremendously amusing. It's sort of the return of the classic Sierra humor which I've so missed. It's sort of like being in a Tick comic which, as far as I can tell, is kind of the point. The fact that it isn't a dark, brooding, seething with generic rage kind of game really makes it stand out. It's the sort of thing that I liked out of the Buffy TV series--while it had its dark and serious moments, it never really took itself too seriously. I can appreciate that.

Mechanics
Champions has three mechanics which I hadn't encountered in other games: tap, tap+hold, and block. That doesn't mean that they're specific to Champions (obviously), only that this is my first encounter with them.

A tap power is a typical clicky a la your favorite MMO. Click on the button, hit 3, and fire off some power. Maybe it has a cooldown, maybe it doesn't. A tap+hold is typically a tap power which does something cool but gets progressively better the longer you hold it. Need a short heal to make sure the tank doesn't die? Tap your healing power and heal a small amount. Want to frontload your damage? Tap+hold your biggest DD and blast the goon into smithereens. Don't think of it as "overkill", think of it as "powering them into the afterlife"! There are also maintained powers which apply a per-tick effect, but these aren't especially new.

Block deserves its own discussion so here we go. One of the things that sucked in CoH was that if you fought a big boss and you weren't a tank (or were a tank without a resistance in that damage type) you pretty much got one shotted if you drew the boss's ire. That's just how it was and it was very lame. Cryptic seems to have learned ever so slightly from those days and have added a block power to all characters. If you block as a maintained power, you can reduce the incoming damage significantly as well as avoiding some but not all status effects (holds, knockbacks, whatever). This is a pretty cool thing because if you pay attention, you can usually avoid getting turned into chunky salsa when you get aggro. In fact, the game hits you over the head with it by sticking big colorful marquee over the tops of Big Bad's head when it's about to do something big and bad to you. In fact, most of the non-trivial bads have something like this and while the lesser of these won't kill you outright most of the time, the really big and ugly bads will almost certainly kill you outright if you don't block. So pay attention! Again, we'll revisit this (extensively) in a future installment.

Nemesis
When you get to level 25, you get to design a nemesis. You pick your nemesis's looks, their powers, their minions, and fight them on a semi-regular basis. The minions will jump you while you're out heroing and will occasionally drop a clue which leads to even more hijinks.

I think this feature is a riot. It's a chance to do some interesting storytelling and give the player a hand in writing that story beyond "I killed all the badguys," or "I clicked all the glowies." It takes the antagonist and makes it somewhat personal which I think is a nice touch. Furthermore, these missions seem to be better written and more difficult than your run-of-the-mill solo missions which is a welcome change of pace.

The next logical (and not unprecedented) evolution of this is allowing the player to design nemesis encounters and share them with other people. That, I think, would be spectacular.

Encounter Design
Some of the encounter design is exceptionally well done. The first 5 person instance you get to (Dr. Destroyer's Robot Factory) is full of interesting bits. You get consoles that you have to hit in sequence. You get infinitely spawning mooks. You get a set of super-campy super villain soliloquies and the final encounter is a giant robot. How can you go wrong with a giant robot?! Without going into finely grained details, I'll say that the parts that are good are really, really good.

Champions Online

2009-09-28T23:15:00.003-04:00

I let myself get talked into playing Champions Online, and like clockwork, the guilty parties left for Aion (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE). Bastards.

The game's been out for just short of a month and I'm a couple days from capping. In fact, if I hadn't been waiting for the afore mentioned bastards, I would have capped easily already. So just like I did with Age of Conan, I'm going to write up my impressions of the game.

Like most games, some good, some bad, and some ugly. Overall, I think it's a good game and worth a good month. More in a bit.

Monthly Mingle: Mexican Fiesta

2009-07-12T17:32:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, I was asked by the purveyor of All Things Edible to participate in a blogging event involving foods. I'm generally not good about Intarwebs events because, well, I usually forget, but this time it was something well worth pursuing: i.e., Mexican foods which totally rock. Note that the actual cooking was done two weeks ago and that the end product has already been consumed with much gusto.

One of my favorite things from Chipotle, the happiest place on Earth, is their barbacoa. I can't type with any authority on what authentic barbacoa entails (cow head?!) but this is my take on Chipotle's version with some interesting twists. My version is basically a spicy braised beef with sauce and I proceed accordingly. But first! Let's inspect the ingredients.

The Raw Team
The Raw Team in this recipe is played by two and a half smallish Vidalias, most of a clove of garlic, and about 6 pounds of chuck roast. In this case, because the butchers at my local megamart hate me, the chuck roast is boneless which annoys me to no end. I would have much rather used a couple 7-bone roasts but I'll be damned if I can find one anywhere on the eastern seaboard. I do like chuck for this application, though, since it's full of fat and connective tissue, very tasty, generally inexpensive, and is generally considered the "classic pot roast".

The Spice Team
Given that this is a classic braise, we want to end up with a flavorful liquid and chunkies. Thus, we require the services of:

Four bay leaves

One can of chipotle chiles and its adobo sauce (yum)

One bottle of cumin, whole

One tablespoon of ground anchos

One tablespoon of ground chipotles to up the smokey goodness

About 3/4 of a cup of my homemade chili powder

About 1/4 of a cup of salt

If that seems like a lot of spice, recall that we have about 6 pounds of meat here and it's all going into a crock pot full of braising liquid. Depending on your particular setup, you may require more or less but the intent is to end up with spicy beef when it's all said and done.

Procedure
Just like I would with a normal pot roast, I seared the beef as best I could without burning down the apartment. This had the expected result of filling the place with smoke but curiously failed to set off the fire alarms.

Into the pot also went the 2.5 onions (sliced) and most of the head of garlic (smashed), and all the spices including the entirety of the can of chipotles. For those who aren't in the know, a chipotle is a smoked jalapeno. I usually get these dried, but in this instance I really wanted the adobo. To quote the great AB: "Adobo is dang tasty but it is double dang hot so don't go addin' more unless you knows what yous doin'." Luckily, I knows what I'm doin'! I can only guess what adobo actually is but if you get canned chipotles, it's almost always present. Don't go rubbing your eyes after handling it, though, I mean it.

Fill the pot until you get the meat mostly submerged, lid it up, turn it on, then let the waiting begin...

The Extraction
Many hours later and your home will be filled with the aroma of cooking chiles and beef which is a pretty awesome thing. You want to cook it long enough that it's going to defy easy extraction by falling apart. In my case, I was impatient and only waited 8 hours. I usually start these kinds of things off in the early morning and eat in the late evening (10 to 14 hours).

Once extracted, allow to cool a bit before shredding. Bonus points if you can restrain yourself from eating the super-heated meat off the platter prior to shredding (super tasty, tho). If you've ever shredded pork barbecue, this is the same maneuver.

This is where things get a little nuts. As is typcial with a large volume of water braise, most of the spice ends up in the liquid and I'm not about to let all that awesome chipotle, er, awesomeness off without a fair trial. Sadly, I have no visual evidence of the procedure, but it went a little something like this:

Skim off the liquid and add to a pan or wide sauce pot being careful not to grab full chipotles and the bay leaves (small bits are fine)

Add about a cup of good-tasting non-balsamic vinegar (I used cider)

Reduce by half

Season to taste

Thicken to a gravy-like consistency (I used cornstarch)

Service Options
Far be it for me to tell you how to eat your barbacoa, but here's what I did with it:

One whole wheat tortilla in the 8" variety

Barbacoa down on the bottom

Pile of cheese (mild cheddar in this case)

Lots of sour cream and sauce on top

OM NOM NOM NOM NOM

Fiesta rice, pintos or black beans, your choice of salsas, or guac would all be welcome additions to the feast but I didn't have any of the above on hand. Also note that the whole wheat tortilla isn't strictly on my diet but, meh, I figured I'd splurge a bit.

Future Work
As this recipe is a work in progress, I'm constantly looking for ways to improve it. Some of the stuff I'm thinking about:

I love cumin but the flavor almost never comes through in large pot braises. I'd like to try toasting it and grinding it immediately prior to cooking but don't have a suitable spice grinder yet.

AB's "potroast without the pot" is a fun approach but I didn't think the foil would hold up well to the adobo. That said, the recipe would certainly benfit from having less water present.

It definitely needed more spice. I'll try steeping dried anchos, chipotles, and arbols in something tasty and adding it to the pot next time. Maybe some smoked paprika would help too.

Moar sear.

Attn: Microsoft Marketing Department

2009-07-02T20:50:00.003-04:00

NO ONE (no one) does the unimaginably ridiculous things that you show in your lame bing commercials. They are loud and annoying and they do not make me want to try your product. In fact, your advertising campaign bothers me so intensely that I may never try your product.

That is all.

The Question Is: "Do You Like Fun?"

2009-06-13T21:59:00.002-04:00

This was the response I got when asking a co-worker if I should buy Red Faction. Well, shit, I like fun and I promptly went against Friday traffic to Best Buy, one of my least favorite places in the world to pick me up summa that. Today around dinnertime I pop the disc in thinking that I'd probably have to update the system software and lo and behold, the game disc even told me so! It even had the appropriate update (2.60) on the disc! Three minutes later, and I'm good to go...so I thought.

Turns out that the system update 2.60 had fried the blu-ray player. Oh yes, good times. Updating to 2.76 also did not work. You can imagine the swearing involved at this point. So now I'm doing a full system restore in the hopes that I don't have to pay Sony 150 of my hard-earned dollars for the continuing priviledge of using their broken-ass software.

I take back all the nice things I've said about Sony and the PS3. This is lame. Did I mention that it'll take 2.5 hours?

(Don't blog when mad, huh? Just wait till I get going!)

I told you I suck at colors

2009-05-05T23:08:00.005-04:00

...so I didn't even try!

The last, oh, two months have been spent in the pursuit of building a Mount & Blade mod. Oh the irony! Crappy documentation: Check. Broken API: Check. Convoluted code: Check. Poor grammar: Check. It's just like work! I might talk about it later but remember: I'm lazy.

This is the title image I made for it at some ridiculously DPI busting 5000x7000 pixels, now resized for more convenient viewing. If I were smart (and it's well documented that I'm not), I would have checked/realized that the image that goes into the game is a diminutive 340x275. A 340x275 image completely loses its meticulously crafted details when resized from gigantic so the three days I spent on it seem...underappreciated.

Rough pencils overdrawn and shaded in paint.net with a crappy 5.5x4" USB tablet. Yes, I have nicer tools (aka Photoshop CSR2 and a giant pressure sensitive Wacom) but I cleverly couldn't be bothered to dig them out. Click to embiggen. Really, it's much nicer.

How Can So Much Love Fit In One Bowl?

2009-03-15T16:34:00.005-04:00

Yes, I said this aloud to no one in particular not 15 minutes ago. The picture says it all.

Well, ok, not "it all", but most of it. The rest of "it all" is played by roughly 2 pounds of cheese, a 1 pound box of macaroni elbows cooked to be super-aldente, about a tablespoon of chipotle powder, and topped with about a cup of the no-longer-elusive panko. All told, roughly $9.

It's telling that despite having had about a half dozen things cooking in my head to put in this space, that this is the one that finally gets me posting.

Carry on.

And Now A Message From Our Sponsors...

2009-01-02T11:58:00.002-05:00

If you've ever moved, you've undoubtedly wondered how you might be able to get your cleaning/security deposit back. This usually requires a lot of elbow grease and the inhalation of dirt, dust, and industrial strength chemicals. If you handle this phase yourself like I typically do, here are a couple helpful product tips.

Kaboom Bathroom Cleaner
If you've watched TV in the states at all, you've probably been accosted by a very large bearded man named Billy Mays who invariably tries to sell you something that appears too good to be true. Kaboom Bathroom Cleaner is one such something.

The year: 2007. The place: Madison Wisconsin. I'm furiously trying to make my three bedroom home market-ready and I'm attempting to deal with a two year old soap scum residue covering the entire bathtub. Nothing is working. Scrubbing Bubbles, even, has failed me. After two days of going through just about every household cleaner I could get my hands on and contemplating replacing the bathtub, I got a tipoff to Kaboom. Off to the nearest one stop shopping center and I'm back with a purple bottle of disaster. Two hours later, the tub is spotless.

The year: 2009. The place: Cockeysville Maryland. I have a strikingly similar two year old soap scum residue covering the entire bathtub (hey, at least I'm consistent). I reach for that trusty purple bottle.

I'm pretty sure that this stuff isn't meant to be handled by normal people--it works too well. I can't believe it's safe to use on bathroom fixtures. I can't say that I've always been happy with stuff I've bought As Seen On TV, but this stuff works and it works pretty goshdarn well.

Mr. Clean Magic Eraser
Upon opening the box, you're greeted by what seems to be a fine foam sponge. In fact, upon contact with water, the Magic Eraser emits a strange liquid that will clean up just about anything off of a wall. In fact, I've pulled the paint off a wall working on a particularly bad stain. It'll grab dirt, grime, scuffs, kitchen stains, and the place where the coat rack fell against the wall and left a nice mark. Best of all, it works super-fast and doesn't seem to leave unpaintable patches later.

I have no idea how this stuff works--and I like it that way. I'm fairly sure that at least one soul changed hands and/or some eldritch evil was tapped to ensure the Magic Eraser's cleaning ability. They named it appropriately and if you need to clean something off of a wall really fast, it's the product I recommend.

Just thought I should pass that along. Oh, and Happy New Year.

Last Days and Long Trips

2008-12-12T22:35:00.003-05:00

Today was my last day; I've had plenty of them. In an attempt to not answer the same questions more than I already have, I'll sum up:

I'm moving to the Boston area.

That's about 400 miles from here (Baltimore area).

I know it's cold there; I grew up where we put spiggots in the trees (bonus: the correct term is spile)

I'm driving up there on Sunday to look for an apartment then driving back here on Tuesday, weather permitting.

I'm in town for a couple days, then driving to Michigan for Christmas.

I'm driving back here before New Year's to pack and clean.

Movers come to pack dishware and CRTs on the 30th.

Movers come for my junk on the 31st.

I'm here in town sans stuff for a few more days till I can take possession of whatever apartment I find reasonable, then I'm heading back to Boston on as permanent a basis as anywhere I've lived.

Seriously, I've answered those questions at least a dozen times just today.

I figure I've got about three days of solid packing and two days of good cleaning before I'm done. Given that I'm lazy and likely to be inebriated during my time in town, I figure a week should be good for the packing plus a few days for the cleaning.

My connectivity and sane-time will be at a premium this holiday, so in case I don't get a chance to say it at a more appropriate time, happy holidays to all.

Bonus Edit!
I've added an articles section for those who just want to see the tech stuff and not details from my boring life.

A Wanderer Again

2008-11-18T12:46:00.002-05:00

I'll be leaving my current place of employ at the end of the year to seek greener pastures. In this case, figuratively, since the change in venue also comes with a significant raise in pay. So I'll be packing my crap up around Christmas to send it about a day's north east to the greater Boston area; hopefully for a good long time to come.

If anyone knows of any good bars in the W/SW suburbs, lemme know.

Games of The Past

2008-11-09T23:23:00.003-05:00

Let's take a trip in the Way Back Machine to the early 90s. I was starting my seven year quest to graduate (twice). The fastest machines you could buy were i386s of which I owned a VASTLY powerful specimen clocking in at 33MHz with 16MB of RAM and a staggering 4.2GB hard drive. Ah yes. The glory days.

Games of those days were different. Machines were pretty limited by today's standards (then again, most everything was) so designers couldn't ride the coattails of super-ultra powerful graphics hardware and million poly models. In fact, the best 3D of the time? X-Wing and Doom! Duke3D is still three years away!

Now, I don't know if there's any real truth to this or not, but I've always felt that games of yesteryear were better designed and written--especially those games around my college years. Maybe the hard walls of available computing power made the designers of the time exercise their imaginations a little harder. Maybe with smaller budgets they were able to explore the depths of the art more deeply than we can today. Perhaps in those days we just expected less realism and more fun. I dunno.

One game which I've always regarded with a great deal of nostalgia is Star Control II; a game that I used to sadly say I never finished. I no longer have to say this! I've known of its existance for a while but never got around to playing it. Seems that the fine folks at Toys For Bob released the 3DO port source and the open source community did a port named The Ur-Quan Masters.

This is one of the greatest games of all time. No, seriously, #17 in IGN's Top 100 and here again in GameSpot's Greatest Games of All Time. Let me splain how awesome this game is...no wait, there is too much, let me sum up:
- The game is jam packed full of some of the best dialog I've ever seen, evar.
- Every race has a unique background and motivation not to mention their own theme music!
- The races are extremely unique.
- There's a good amount of cause and effect.
- The game has a good pace both in tactical combat and in the story line.
- You get to save the Galaxy! Come on, how awesome is that?!

I sincerely hope that my former employers (Activision; now Acti-Blizzard or Blizzivision or somesuch) a) choose to make a true follow up, b) hand it to Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford who did the original, and c) don't make it into something lame a la X-COM Enforcer. In any event, you owe it to yourself to play this game if you haven't already done so. It's by far the best game I've played this year.

Food For Thought

2008-10-14T10:29:00.002-04:00

One of the blogs I read on a semi-regular basis is Seth Godin's. Agreeing or not aside he's linked a few times to Gaping Void, the site for the guy (Hugh MacLeod) who draws comics on the backs of business cards whose work I totally dig.

Well, it's Tuesday and I'm supposed to be working but like so many other Tuesdays, I'm stuck in the middle of a very tedious and boring task--as is the fate of many-a Systems Programmer over the ages (Internet time here, people). I don't get out to Gaping Void nearly enough but reading through some stuff there, I ran across this nugget from his September 12th post titled "Good ideas have lonely childhoods":

5. "I want to be part of something! Oh, wait, no I don't!" I've seen this before so many times, both first-hand and with other people. Your idea seems to be working, seems to be getting all sorts of traction, and all of a sudden you got all these swarms of people trying to join the team, wanting to get a piece of the action. And then as as soon as they get a foothold inside the inner circle, you soon realize they don't really understand your idea in the first place, they just want to be on the winning team. And the weirdest bit is, they don't seem to mind sabotaging the original idea that got them interested in the first place, in order to maintain their newfound social status. It's probably the most bizarre bit of human behavior I've ever witnessed first-hand in business, and it's AMAZINGLY common. [AFTERTHOUGHT: "People are not primarily governed by their own self-interest. People are primarily governed by their own self-delusion."]

Rarely do I encounter something that expresses my own intuition as well as that.

AoC: Final Thoughts

2008-09-30T18:31:00.002-04:00

Whereas I think that ultimately, AoC wanted to be a great game, it falls well short of the mark due to some designer shortsightedness, some very unfortunate bugs, and a posture that makes it fairly unapproachable by the masses. That said, I did quite enjoy a large part of it. Those of us who delve into this sphere of gaming all too often forget the parts that were good and fun when we get a' ranting and that's a shame. It is, after all, us, who largely determine its legacy.

More importantly, I think that in this day of (very) derivative design, that Funcom took a very bold step in an interesting direction. I can't say that I wholely agree with that direction, but in an age of autoattacks and the lowest common denominator, they struck out into the largely unexplored wilderness of more hardcore design. I think that's great and hope that more games strike out unto the unknown.

[edit: for some reason, this didn't post when I told it to. carry on.]

AoC: The Bad

2008-09-29T12:06:00.000-04:00

Age of Conan is not without its problems. Most games are like this. Age of Conan, however, seems to have more than its fair share.

System Requirements
World of Warcraft, for everything everyone says that sucks about it, runs on just about every machine you'd possibly think would run it. I ran it on a variety of old laptops for crying out loud. Age of Conan has no such ability.

My machine here is a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo overclocked (most of the time) to 2.8GHz. It has 2GB of RAM, a 10K HDD and a 768MB GeForce 8800 graphics card. Age of Conan does not run fast on this machine. I have to turn stuff down. I don't think this is because the engine is particularly uber-awesome but I can't say for sure either. Normally I'd give a developer with a decent game the benefit of the doubt, but read on...

Bugs, Bugs, Bugs (not the wabbit)
All games have bugs. Anyone worth their salt who's worked on a shipping game can probably point at any of their products and point out at least one thing that's not quite right. Some may not be significant, but if a large portion of your client base is crashing every, say, 2 hours on an out of memory error, say, three months after release, I think I'm safe in saying that not everyone is going to be terribly understanding.

ButThatsNotAll! Seemingly every patch they break something, often in the process of, um, fixing something else. As a for instance: something that irked me to no end, is that in the process of fixing something related to conrols being saved per windows user, they broke the ability to bind your keys. This remained broken (with a convoluted work around) for the better part of three weeks. This also broke the handy thing that displayed the key combo on the hotbar. I had more than 50 things hotkeyed; yes, that's just about every button in the interface and it was damned hard to remember what they all were without the handy display.

So many bugs, so few words, so I will further share with you but one. The issue is that for crafting you need silk for mid/high level cloth gear. Silk of the normal type doesn't drop except for mid 50ish mobs. If you're higher than L50 (say, L80) you don't get crap for silk because drop rate is based on con level and, well, those L50 mobs are all super grey. Realizing the problem two months too late, Funcom decided to fix it. In the guild zones/crafting zones they added spawns of spiders. What do spiders weave? Spider silk! What do spiders drop? Cotton! Cotton is the lowest level cloth crafting drop. As it's been two weeks since I drafted this post,I'd like to check to see if it's been fixed but I can't since they've also broken the patcher and thus, I can't actually log in.

Everyone Wears the Same Gear
DAoC had the same problem but in DAoC's defense, the technology wasn't quite there for a huge amount of gear variation (circa 2001). Everyone pretty much wore the same shit, dyed it all black, and had the same spec until ToA which miserably broke the game. It's now 2008 and the game install for AoC on my disk right now is in excess of 26GB. They couldn't have found space to add a few more variations for player gear textures?

Post the starting island, everyone will pretty much be wearing the same gear. As an added bonus, my level 21 armor looks exactly like my level 80 armor! No, seriously, it's exactly the same. This is not hyperbole, they're exactly same models and textures. I'd post screen shots but as mentioned before, I can't actually log in. They've demonstrated that they have some great artists, so what gives? It's even pretty much the same boring crap between genders! Mr. Yahtzee got this one spot on.

Healing is Limited
I was reticent to put this under bad; I think they've done a very cool thing design-wise, but before talking about why it's bad I gotta explain how it works. If you want to avoid a long and somewhat arduous meander through the AoC mechanics, feel free to skip to the next section. Really, it's long, and I won't be offended.

There are three healer classes (Bear Shaman, Tempest of Set, Priest of Mitra). Each class has three basic heals: a large heal over time, a small heal over time, and a largeish aoe lump sum heal. The largeish lump sum heal has a 1 minute debuff that doesn't allow that same heal to affect the target. So two bear shaman can't stagger their big heals at all, though they do stack between the other healer classes. This is where it gets interesting: the big HoTs don't stack between classes, but the small ones do. It gets even more interesting for raid groups because the big heals are raid-wide while the HoTs are not. While there are other heals available, other than by potions, they're pretty small.

This is brilliant on one hand and terrifying on the other. Healing for any given group is fixed. You can swap out healer types and the amount of healing you get is pretty much the same. Your healers in a single group stack exactly to three, but you get diminishing returns after the first one. You can't increase healing significantly through gear or talents and since the vast majority of it is in the form of HoTs, you sort of let them go and that's pretty much it. This leaves the healer classes to go off and do other things like make the current target dead--generally agreed upon to be more interesting than watching little hitpoint bars.

What you can't do is deal with burst damage. I've called them "large heals" but they're about 1500 at L80 on a tank with probably 12K hitpoints. This is not a lot given that you can only fire it off every minute, i.e. maybe twice or three times per single-group boss. You can triple this by having three healers of different types but it's still not a lot. The long shot here is that you can calculate pretty easily and within some tolerance exactly how much healing is in an ideal group. Though I have doubts they did so consistently, you would think that it would be relatively easy to determine how much DPS an encounter could have. This seems ideal but is, in my opinion, quite flawed.

My main issue is that it means that encounter designers can't increase incoming dps significantly without blowing out the encounter parameters such that no one could beat it without luck. Perhaps they intended for this to spur their designers into more interesting mechanics. Alternatively, they might intend for a more interesting tanking game; who's to say?! The end result is that the dynamic range of encounters at least DPS-wise is fairly small.

A perhaps even more nefarious issue is that it fixes pretty significantly the make up of your groups in a way that not even the most ardent opponent of theorycrafting could ignore. In WoW, you could often get first kills by stacking heals, tanks, or DPS. This is good because you can keep making progress and picking up gear which will help you progress and keep morale up. Gear isn't that big a deal in AoC (largely anyway, by design) and you can't really vary the healing amount. So you're stuck with only one slider instead of two as a raid leader, and even if you bring down a new boss, it doesn't help your raid very much. I know that this topic was healing but its real effect doesn't really sink in until you consider it in context.

Poor Quest Distribution
Solo quests ran out for me at about L72 and I did a lot of grinding prior to that. You get some repeatable quests at L40 that you can repeat once a day until L80 but come on, that's boring as shit. There aren't even very many good places to grind beyond those so if you want L80 on your own terms, you don't even get many choices. City of Heroes had some of the same problem but there were at least a number of places you could grind. Even then, I'd like to think that the day of the pointless grind is long gone. Can we truly do no better in 2008?

There are a number of group quests in the range which are pretty good, but they're generally way too difficult for a not good group to succeed. Grouping in AoC is a very different game, moreso than usual for these typese of games, due in large part to the extremely limited healing ability. This by itself is not an issue, until you have to chance the feared pick up group who are used to the extreme levels of healing in other games. Now, I like the grouping dynamic in AoC, but it's really not obvious how it works on initial inspection. On the one hand, it's got a good bit of depth, but on the other hand, you'll never be all that effective without delving pretty deep into the mechanics. It's sort of like Vanguard in this respect; something I really like about both games.

The problem, as always, is it's not always convenient for people to group when playing and I really wish more designers would take that into consideration. AoC does a reasonably good job through most of the level range but the nearer you get to L80 the more spotty and less polished it becomes in this respect. I understand that work in this area has continued since I quit playing and that it's better than it was, but that's of little consolation for someone who had to grind eight of the most boring levels.

PvP Mechanics Are Broken
PvP mechanics in AoC are broken at a deep and fundamental level. Player hitpoints are too low and player damage is too high. They say they're fixing this in "the next big patch which is coming next week" which has been "coming next week" for more than half the time I've been playing. As a Bear Shaman (healer) with a good quality weapon and no damage gems, I crank out in excess of 2500 points of damage self-buffed with a single combo. For comparison, I have about 3800 hitpoints self-buffed. Bear Shaman is not a DPS class. Surely, that's not so bad, is it?!

With some well designed player crafted gear (i.e., fully +damage gems) and an epic smacker, I'm doing in excess of 4500 points of damage self-buffed with a single combo. When fighting normal mobs, I often don't use my damage buff because one normal combo will kill them outright. Imagine what this does to players! Nobody likes getting one-shot and in AoC right now, this is the norm. This is further exacerbated by the fact that you can't reasonably increase your hit point total beyond what the designers intended. So even in super-tuned crafted gear, I'm at the same 3800 hitpoints.

Everything in the Endgame Takes Lots of People
For the sake of full disclosure, I'm a raider at heart. I love taking apart encounters and applying obscure class abilities at the appropriate times for loot and great justice. It's the same satisfaction I get from putting together very large Lego models and base busting in RTS games--it's a problem solving experience and I like those. What I don't like about raiding is the HUGE amount of coordination it takes to get any number of people >2 at the same place at the same time and moving in something resembling the same direction, not to mention the subsequent drama over the aforementioned loot should any actually be acquired. AoC takes this hassle and applies it to just about everything interesting in the post 70 game.

For example: I've always crafted. I like crafting because I like making things, especially if I can make useful things. Crafting in AoC requires buildings in a guild city. You need 24 people to create a guild. You can get lots of alts so ok, that's not so bad. You also need a guild city. Hookay, the tier 1 guild city is a pain, but not too awful bad, probably a good 10-20 man hours or so if you know what you're doing. This gets you to L70 items. The next tier of craftable items is L75. This requires a T2 guild city. This costs you a good 50-60 man hours if you know what you're doing (don't even ask about the T3 city).

If you're in a small guild, these requirements are heavy which is a problem, because no one wants to run around a resource zone gathering materials as a full time job. Forget making L80 stuff; I don't think anyone in the game has built a full T3 city yet. You can't be a solo crafter. This is unfortunate, because crafting has traditionally been a solo endeavor; something to do when all your pals are sleeping off a hangover (or whatever).

Raiding really goes without saying, and compared to WoW's 40 (at least, when I played), 24 is way more attainable. But what if you're broke and want to make some coin so you can buy some new gear? Well, you're largely screwed because there's such a dearth of soloable content; doubly so because normal mobs drop so little coin. So your best bet is getting a group together and running through whatever instance pops into mind. You probably can't use the drops because for the most part, they pretty much all suck, but they at least vendor for pocket change.

Ok, what about PvP? PvP has been a pretty good bet while solo for most of the games I've played. PvP in AoC has three basic categories: world PvP (just about any zone on a PvP server or frontier zones on PvE servers), mini-game PvP (FPS type scenarios like CTF for small teams), and large scale siege warfare (think: keep raids in DAoC but not relic raids--it doesn't get that big). I don't play on a PvP server so I can't talk about that but I suspect it's the same as most PvP servers--there when you don't want it, hard to find when you do. Mini-games are pretty much nonexistant on my server (Dagoth). Siege warfare, well, that's a whole new ball of wax and one that I didn't get to participate in so I won't even rant about it here. Suffice to say that you need a T3 keep and enough goods to build another keep in a contested zone. That seems a bit extreme.

AoC: The Good

2008-08-30T12:08:00.000-04:00

I've been playing Age of Conan for the better part of three months now; most of you probably already know that. Some of you have probably already heard my rantings on such but in an effort for closure, I'm writing them up here. For the haters out there, yes, I got to 80, and yes, I did a fair share of PvP, but no, I didn't raid. As always, YMMV.

This write-up ended up being way more gigantically huge than I expected, so I'm breaking it up into parts. Stay tuned for the next exciting installment!

The Storytelling
LotRO, for everything I disliked about it, had some pretty good storytelling for the storyline quests at least (the rest of the quests were...uninspired). The storyline quests in that game featured some well-narrated voice overs and some truly epic-feeling instances that were woven in pretty well with the Middle Earth stories we all know and love. Time has robbed me of specific examples, but you generally spent a lot of time clearing the way for the Fellowship or blocking the way of the unrelenting evildoers. I never saw the end of the game (too boring, sorry), but the storyline was the one shining gem amidst a fairly mediocre and redundant game, IMO.

Age of Conan seems to take this the next step--it pushes all the normal MMO mechanics we, um, "know and love" and weaves them into a story with all of the epic trappings befitting the Conan license. There's a great evil (check), it threatens all of existance (check), there needs to be a hero to deal with it (check), and that hero is you! (check) Ok, so we've got the basics covered; it doesn't really deviate at all from any epic fantasy plot. (cue writers)

So why can you res when you die? They go to great pains to explain this! It's worked into the story! I know, nuts, isn't it? If you're such a badass, why are you getting worked by low level thugs? They explain that too! Inside the fictional framework they've put in place, it even makes sense in a fantasy-plot-logic kind of way. That's a ballsy move. They could have left all of that unsaid like every other MMO I've played to date, but they didn't. The only glaring hole they left that I noticed is that everyone's a hero but, ya know, they did so well with the rest of it that I'll spot 'em that one.

The storyline quests were, in fact, the one part of the game that I really looked forward to. I was sad that post noobalicious island, there's only a handful of them and they're spaced pretty far apart.

The Voiceovers
I'm a sucker for voice overs; I don't know why. For the vast majority of games to date, they're awful. Some of my favorite games, in fact, have crappy voice overs (Spellforce was all over the map, the sequel was not much better, and many of Vanguard's voice overs were downright cringeworthy). It doesn't take much to come up with a list of games with crappy voice overs (don't even get me started on CivRev or EQ2) but coming up with the opposite list is way harder. Among the tops, IMO, are Mechwarrior IV: Mercenaries, Supreme Commander + expansion, and now, Age of Conan.

The entirety of the dialog is voiced over for the intro island (1-20). All of the storyline quests are voiced over. While some of them are mediocre, some of them are quite excellent. In particular, Rhiderch, your spiritual guide through most of the early parts past the intro, is quite well played, in addition to Turoch, Laranga, and Cassilda in the intro. In fact, Rhiderch has a set of dialog after you finish the last part of the quest at 80 for no other reason than story. The kicker? This game is not made where English is a first language! I'd love to know how the other language versions of the voiceovers are.

The Combat System
Admittedly, the combo system isn't what I was expecting, but that's their fault for picking terminology from a different genre. You basically get three swings to start with (left, middle, right) and add two more at a later level (lower left, lower right). To go with that, there's a set of shields on your opponent signifying where their defense is. Hitting a heavily shielded direction means you do a heck of a lot less damage so you're rewarded for hitting places where your opponent's defense isn't. To that end, there's no auto-attack. None. Every strike your character does is more or less because you hit a button to create that action.

A combo is just a starter with a string of attacks in a given sequence that, when uninterrupted, yields a multi-part hit at the end usually doing high damage and looking really cool. These start low (one move) and end very high (four moves). It's sometimes tricky landing a combo on a moving target especially when it's a four move job but it's not impossible. I'd expected a more freeform thing where you stick moves together and they speed up or slow down or have other bonuses/penalties but that's just my fighting game background shining through, I guess.

The thing I like most about the combat system in AoC is that you can't phone it in. You have to be aware and awake and mashing away at the right buttons at the right time. If you're not, you're probably not going to survive anything more than the most trivial of encounters. It's even more important when grouping since no character has even footing with any of the epic level mobs (elites from WoW).

The Art

The game looks really good. If you've got enough machine to do so, crank everything up as far as you can for the love of pixels. The environments are excellent. The character models are excellent. The weapon models are excellent. Normally I don't care terribly much about such things but this game looks really good. Just look at the screenshots.

Wheels

2008-08-08T23:45:00.007-04:00

Seemingly forever ago, I was at the beginning of what would be my last winter in Illinois. My modus transportatus at the time was a 1987 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera which we regarded not-so-fondly as the "Gutless" because it had trouble moving its 2900lb bulk even with a 2.8L V6 when it wasn't stalling in the middle of the road. At this point in the not so distant past, I had already had the transmission rebuilt twice and it was in pretty bad need of some intensive care. I was not prepared to provide this care (Damnit Jim, I'm an engineer, not a mechanic!) so it was time to replace it.

This is what I got:

This is the Saturn SL1, 2002 model. It was the last of its kind having been replaced by the not-critically-acclaimed Saturn Ion. As you may remember from my previous not-so-award-winning post on Fragmentation, it's mostly made of plastic. Thus, it weighs in at a comparatively svelte 2350lbs and is reasonably powered by a 1.9L 100hp inline 4. If that doesn't sound like a lot of power, it's because it isn't; but it was plenty enough to kick the crap out of the dying Gutless. It gets on average, 35mpg in city and 40mpg or more on the highway if there aren't a lot of hills (i.e., not PA). Yes, that's right, I get more than 40mpg on the highway most of the time (highest clocked in at 44mpg or so on a straight shot through Ohio).

After purchasing the vehicle, I ended up leaving the state for Virginia soon thereafter only to move to Wisconsin in a couple years, and now Maryland a couple years after that. You wouldn't believe the pain in locating and then transferring my title. It's been through a lot in the roughly 6 years I've owned it and still is in pretty good working order. It's a great car, even if a bit low on power, and it's hard to beat the gas mileage. But as much as I love my SL1, it was time for something new and hot.

Imagine my surprise when Saturn not only came through with a very sporty vehicle that I wouldn't have to haggle for, but also came through with one of the top vehicles in its class! I present to you, my brand new Saturn Sky Redline, 2009:

The Redline comes equipped with a 2.0L 260hp turbocharged inline 4 and has a curb weight of about 2900lbs. No amount of my picture taking can adequately capture its knuckle biting beauty. It is also not slow. No, sir, it is not. And if you compare it to just about any other vehicle in its class, it comes out ahead either in looks, power, or power/price ratio. Seriously. Go compare for yourself if you don't believe me. I'll wait.

I don't think I've ever owned a nicer thing. I even learned to drive stick so that certain people (you know who you are!) wouldn't mock me for buying a slushbox. For a guy who's spent more time driving 10+ year old rust buckets than otherwise, it's a pretty big change of pace and a heck of a lot of fun.

Safety Tip #948

2008-07-10T18:49:00.002-04:00

When one desires a piece of pie, avoid the urge to eat the pie in place (in the tin) even if you live alone.

That is all.

Fragmentation And You!

2008-05-21T22:53:00.000-04:00

In the continuing series of posts about Stuff They Never Tell You About Game Development, I'm going to rant a bit about fragmentation, why it's evil, and how you can stop its nefariousness.

Fragmentation is basically where you've got a something that's X big but all the wee tiny bits where you can place your something are too small even though your something would totally fit if the space weren't partitioned so badly. Consider me trying to park in Fell's Point (this is near the water in Baltimore for those wondering):

If you try to park on the street in Fell's Point, you will rapidly learn that there are no lines on the street. This means that people with giant SUVs getting less than 10 mpg highway have NO IDEA where to park their environment destroyingly inefficient vehicles. I drive a tiny Saturn which is mostly made of plastic. It does not ever fit in the spaces left. If only (heaven forbid) I could rearrange these parking challenged bozos' vehicles, I would have plenty of room!

This, friends, is fragmentation at its ugliest. It also happens in your computer's memory (among other places).

Backing Stores and Virtual Memory and Consoles, Oh My!
Memory fragmentation is basically like the two images above: you've got X amount free but it's all broken up into tiny bits that you can't really use. It's a Bad Thing (TM). Occasionally you need to allocate something big and contiguous like an image or something and those tiny bits just aren't going to cut it even though it would totally fit if you could add up all the tiny bits. This requires another chunk of memory to be grabbed from the free store to satisfy your request.

For a normal modern OS, this usually isn't a big deal because we have a) a backing store like a hard drive, and b) a good virtual memory system that can page things in and out if you get near the end of physical RAM a la your undergraduate OS course. The worst that usually happens is the program is a little more chuggy (or a lot more chuggy, depending on your system) and you get fragged more often because your framerate dips and you just can't dodge that guy's rail anymore (bastard).

On a console or embedded device (like the iPhone) it's a whole lot more catastrophic. We may or may not have a backing store. We may or may not even have a basic virtual memory system. It probably doesn't use the backing store that we may or may not have to page RAM even if it has the hardware to do so. So we may or may not be screwed when trying to allocate a giant piece of memory for the screen grab of your most recent death because railboy is totally hacking. By "screwed" here I mean "crash" because that's usually what such devices do. And, sadly, in this situation, we're usually screwed.

How It Be Happenin'
Consider the following horribly-contrived-yet-so-close-to-actual-production-code-I've-seen-recently-that-it-makes-me-shiver-just-typing-it example:


vector StuffToLoad;
StuffToLoad.push_back( "some_prefs.xml" );
StuffToLoad.push_back( "a_texture.dds" );
StuffToLoad.push_back( "this_is_temp.dds" );
StuffToLoad.push_back( "big_honkin_asset.stuff" );
StuffToLoad.push_back( "another_asset.stuff" );
for ( uint ii=0; ii<stufftoload.size(); i++ )
{
     LoadAsset( StuffToLoad[ii] );
}

The basic idea is that it's trying to load a bunch of stuff. During the loading of those assets, it really needs the "this_is_temp.dds" texture prior to loading "big_honking_asset.stuff" but then gets rid of both of it and the prefs XML file. Those of you who have dealt with this issue are probably headpalming right now (just play along). For this exercise, we'll assume that LoadAsset allocates exactly once per asset. and UnloadAsset properly deallocates that one allocation. So how swiss-cheeseified does this snippet make your memory?

That's the big blocks, certainly. What about the rest of it? The bad news is that depending on your particular compiler and the version of the Standard C++ Library you're using (otherwise known as the STL), it might be much, much worse. At the very least, the vector is going to allocate at least once but more likely two or three times. Each string pushed into the vector is probably going to allocate once for the string. If LoadAsset's prototype looks like this:


     BOOL LoadAsset( string AssetToLoad );

it probably allocates once per function call for the pass by value (hooray for copy constructors!) as well. So by the time you get to allocating the one chunk for your optimzed LoadAsset, you've probably blown two tiny temporary allocations on strings! Load and unload a bunch of assets and you're nickling and diming your memory to screwedness!

For people not used to thinking about this kind of optimization, this often comes as a complete shock. This kind of thing usually requires someone (typically me), to go through piles of code to root these things out of them because memory is prodigiously perforated and the game crashes if you play it a lot. This is both tedious and error prone and a better solution is to not write it like this in the first place.

This is one way fragmentation happens and it's really, really painful to deal with after the fact. Such issues tend to not manifest themselves until the very end of the game which tends to only get played near the end of the project which is where disasters tend to collect leading to some very, very long work weeks. Don't ask how I know this. To make matters worse, it only takes one dood to sprinkle such gems throughout a significant portion of your codebase.

If You Were Looking For an Easy Fix, You Will Be Disappointed
WIthout going into a lot of gory details about How To Write A Memory Manager in C++, I'm going to have to gloss over some details (besides, that's for a different post). The basic gist of how to deal with fragmentation is to have a decent idea of how your program's memory is going to be used and be uber-careful with anything that might allocate.

For the example above, we know that both string and vector are going to allocate at least some memory. We can provide an allocator to it or remove them completely since, at least in this example, we don't actually need most of what they do and our list is hardcoded anyway. We can further make this better by having a temporary heap that we know is going to be churning a bunch and pass that into the LoadAsset function so our two temporary assets don't fragment the main heap either. At that point, we can optimize the heap function for the temp heap to prevent fragmentation since we're going to hammer it (and believe me, once you have such a heap, you will hammer it). Here's a somewhat less fragmenty version:


struct AssetLoadInfo
{
      const char *mAssetName;
      uint mHeapIndex;
};
AssetLoadInfo *c_StuffToLoad[] =
{
     { "some_prefs.xml",         c_tempHeap    },
     { "a_texture.dds",          c_defaultHeap },
     { "this_is_temp.dds",       c_tempHeap    },
     { "big_honkin_asset.stuff", c_defaultHeap },
     { "another_asset.stuff",    c_defaultHeap },
     { NULL, 0 }
};

BOOL LoadAsset( const AssetLoadInfo  &rfAssetInfo );
BOOL UnloadAsset( const char *AssetName );
for ( uint ii=0; NULL != c_StuffToLoad[ii].mAssetName; ii++ )
{
    LoadAsset( c_StuffToLoad[ii] );
}
UnloadAsset( "some_prefs.xml" );
UnloadAsset( "this_is_temp.jpg" );

We aren't talking rocket science here, but it does require programmers to carefully consider what they're doing. C++ makes it stupifyingly easy to make a mess of things and you just don't want to get yourself backed into a corner with fragmentation when your game is being released on a console. People don't like it when their games crash (believe me on this one).

There's WAY more to it than just small optimizations like the one above. Having a proper memory strategy, making sure that you have a proper memory budget, and making your own memory allocation devices are all super important in memory limited situations and can save you an awful lot of painful debugging. See you next time for the next installment of "Stuff They Never Tell You About Game Development"!

MIND THE GAP!

2008-05-09T17:45:00.001-04:00

Ever been on one of those projects where someone (usually the leadership) thinks it's going way better than it actually is? If you've spent a reasonable amount of time in software, you probably have. Here, then, is my sole addition to the software engineering lexicon. Feel free to use this whenever appropriate.

The distance between the actual doneness of a project and the perception of doneness is hereby defined as the Reality Gap.

So, assuming you had some magical way to determine precisely how far along on a project (or task, or whatever) you are, the distance between there and where you think you are is the Reality Gap. If the Reality Gap is large, then, well, your team may be tremendously optimistic or, sadly, in denial. Welcome to deathmarch.

I mention this for no reason whatsoever. None.

Switch?

2008-05-08T23:41:00.001-04:00

Over the last, I dunno, few years or so, I've been trying to justify buying a Mac. in fact, it's been long enough that this post has been in my drafts list for the better part of a year and a half. Let's face it, I'm a die hard PC guy and a gamer and Macs just don't stack up in many of the ways I care about.

A brief historical interlude: way back in the day when OSX was first introduced, I remember having talks with one Jeff Kopmanis who at the time was the IT guy at the AI lab where I worked. I trust his opinion and he was Mac optimistic. Fast forward to my near-Chicago days and I had a bunch of friends who were also Mac optimistic, notably one Andy Carra whom you might recall is at least partially responsible for my tastes in laptops.

Around the time I was first writing up this post I was tooling around on AnandTech where I tend to go for hardware news when I want such things and I found this article and this article. Ever since there's been a BEER, I've been toying with the idea of porting it to the mac because, well, I know nothing about programming for the mac and goshdarnit, that's something I'd like to know. I'm told by people in the indie biz that the mac has a pretty captive audience who are just dying to have some games to play on their spiffy machines.

I now give you:

Exhibit A: the unbelievably slick design of these lovely slices of awesome

Exhibit B: the iPhone which I will own soon (very soon), and

Exhibit C: the iPhone SDK which will let me program for the thing

So yeah. I have a problem with technology; I'm an addict. I have no problem with this. I now own an iMac.

Oh man.

Better

2008-04-12T19:09:00.000-04:00

My Fridge

2008-04-08T22:52:00.004-04:00

Sign #5,731 that you've been crunching too much:
BEHOLD! My Fridge:

Click to embiggen.

Oh Man...

2008-02-21T21:30:00.003-05:00

I probably shouldn't have done it but I did anyway. In fact, I'd talked myself out of it for a few months but really, I didn't stand a chance. Behold!

And You Thought My New Year's Resolution Was Bad

2008-01-02T16:54:00.000-05:00

This is why I love BA.

That is all.

Happy New Year

2008-01-01T16:49:00.000-05:00

I hope y'all had a good holiday and didn't have too many hangovers. Me? I ate entirely too much and spent way too much time in airports.

I don't have any big release this year, not that GWA was a big release or anything, and I didn't even really do that much work over break aside from the work I get paid for. That's mostly due to a high level of burnout and the fact that at my parents' place in AZ, I don't have a quiet place to do work.

In keeping with my (now) two year tradition, I'm not posting New Year's Resolutions here. To this statement, I'll make one concession today. The one not-quite-resolution is doing more work at home and releasing more stuff here. I'd like to write more technical stuff and release more code, even if it's not in game form.

True Story

2007-12-10T11:04:00.000-05:00

Last night I had some time so I fired up Spellforce 2: Shadow Wars. I didn't buy it because there's a half nekkid dark elf on the box, (though I might have bought this one because of the box art). I think I'm about halfway through given the mix of races, the explored vs. unexplored portions of the map, and comparisons with the original (they both follow the same general plot and buildup lines).

Without getting into a lot of detail about the game or the setup, the two characters in question here are Bors, the fighter dood, and the hunter Mordecay who at this point is fairly new in the party. On my way back through a zone to take care of some side-quests I found a named baddie and proceded to open a can on it. It dropped a pretty good two handed sword. This was the resulting voice-over banter (as best as I can remember; I was kind of drunk):

Mordecay: "Hunter weapon."
Bors: "No it isn't!"
Mordecay: "Roll?"
Bors: "Bah!"

That's far too awesome.

Two Book Recommendations

2007-12-09T14:55:00.000-05:00

Since we've been crunching, I haven't had a lot of time to do a whole lot of development at home. So instead, I've been trying to catch up on my reading. As in the title, there are not one, but two books that I'm prepared to recommend to y'all.

The first one is by one Gerald Weinberg
Becoming A Technical Leader. He's the author of such classics as PL-1 Programming: A Manual of Style and
The Psychology of Computer Programming. (The former may not have aged quite as well as the latter for those keeping score.)

It's quite a good text; the kind that really makes you think if you're willing to.

The second is a bunch of stuff that I'd already read, handily polished up and put into dead tree form: Managing Humans by one Michael Lopp of Rands in Repose fame whose link you can also find over there on the right. Rands is the sort of manager I wish I had at my first three jobs but didn't (seriously). Ever wonder if you and your boss are speaking a different language? It's because you are and Rands will tell you all about it. It's good stuff and should be required reading for anyone who manages technical people.

Mind the Rubble

2007-12-02T15:10:00.000-05:00

The good thing about ridiculously long compile times is that you get time to do stuff like update your blog's template.

Carry on.

Full of Fail

2007-11-21T22:53:00.001-05:00

They say you shouldn't blog angry. You can add that to the long list of seemingly good advice that I don't heed.

So I've been in crunch for the last couple months which in general makes me crankier than normal. At some point in the last week or so I picked up the Supreme Commander expansion. You also might recall that I like Supreme Commander. It is, after all, being the spiritual succesor of one of my all-time favoritest games.

I verily took said expansion, installed it, ran it, patched it (multiple times) and for my $39.99 at that hive of scum and villainy otherwise known as Best Buy, I got this:

That's it. No indication of what's wrong in any kind of end-user-meaningful way. No clear recourse as to how to fix the issue whatsoever. Smashing. I'm going to guess that this has something to do with SecureROM. Ya know what? If my reward for buying the game is not being able to play it then maybe I shouldn't be buying your games! There's probably a workaround but the days of me having to fiddle around with that kind of shit should be way over. It isn't 1997 anymore.

Guys, I know software is hard, but would it be too much to let me play the game I just bought?

Oh man...

2007-11-20T23:43:00.000-05:00

Crap. Double crap.

So sad; I just bought one of these so I can't justify it (even to myself). But they're soooo coooool!

Stupid technology addiction.

What You Should Know About Load Times

2007-11-10T11:47:00.000-05:00

(cleverly abbreviated as WYSKALT)

If I have time to get pissed off and say "I can't help but notice that I'm not playing your game RIGHT NOW," then it means your load times suck and I'm probably wondering why I bought your game in the first place.

This seems bad!

Loading your game off media isn't rocket science. I'm going to assume that we're loading off some kind of disc with a 'c' media like in a console game rather than your hard drive like on your PC of choice. However, anything applied to optimize load times on disc-with-a-c will also optimize disk-as-in-hard-drive as well. I'm not going to cover everything with load times in this post, but this is the absolute bare minimum of stuff you need to know but I couldn't fit it in quite as catchy an acronym. There's lots more stuff that will make load times even better which I might rant about at a later date.

So at any rate, here we go.

Opening Files Sucks
Most times we don't notice this. Occasionally you run into something where you need to load N files which are kinda small but where N is something gigantic (like 1000). Then you notice--even if you have an uber fast machine. On this generation of console, N is usually on the order of thousands for a given level load for those who might be curious.

Fixing this is uber-easy: pack all your files into one giant uber-file so you only ever need to have one or at most a small number of file handles open. We often know of these as zips, wads, paks, pigs, etc. (The one I use for BEER is "keg". Clever, no?)

This makes load times suck less which is the goal. Sadly, they still suck.

Loading Non-Sequential Data Sucks
So now you've got your data all archived and it's time to load it. Surprise! It still takes a long time because you're constantly seeking around in your uber file. I can hear you smug Win32 people scoffing--but remember that your file mapping eats virtual address space and I know that since you're still using WinXP that you only get two gigs of VM. Ha!

This is pretty easy conceptually: stick all the data in your archive in order. The bad news is that depending on your particular data set and load time trickery, this might be really hard in practice. Chances are good that it leans toward the really hard side because you might only load some subset of your data and probably don't have a fixed order for it. If you can make your loading respect a fixed order then the problem moves pretty quickly to the easy side again.

I've found that in most cases the best we can hope for is that some subset can be made to lean toward "most" for fixed sequentiality. Sometimes you can change the loading code to do nicer things; sometimes you can't for <fill in the blank> reason that fits your situation. In either case you need to generate a sequence list for some set of your data then stick all the data in your archive in that order as best you can. Neither of these are particularly difficult assuming you have source code and enough time to do stuff and an archive builder that doesn't totally blow chunks.

Why does this work? Once file open issues are dealt with, seek time tends to be the dominant factor in unruly data sets. On discs-with-a-c, each seek is going to weigh in at roughly between 50 and 150 milliseconds depending on your particular hardware. So, if you're loading 10MB of data but seeking 100 times, your load bandwidth for that data can be no better than 1MB/s in the best case (assuming a flat 100ms/seek which is normal). If you try to load a gig of data with that bandwidth, then, well, I'll not be alone in returning your game.

So: if you can significantly reduce the number of seeks your game needs to do, you can significantly reduce the load time of your game. I've seen particularly poorly loading data sets extend the load time of a 100MB data set more than five minutes. For those in the audience reaching for calculators, that's a bandwidth of less than 1MB/3seconds. Glacial.

But Our Game Is On the Hard Drive!
Don't care. These will still make your loads better. Your seeks are still on the order of 8ms and your bandwidth isn't free. Wait till your users start fragmenting the crap out out their drives. Galactic Civilizations is a reasonably fun game but its load times are absolutely brutal. Why? Tons of tiny files none of which seem to be in easy-to-load formats just sittin' there on the disk. Lots of games are like this for the PC and it's a damned shame.

Oh! You did that for your modders, did you? Guess what; you can still put most of your stuff in order in archive. You can even give modders your packing tools so their stuff loads fast too! Sure, you have to design for it but you're already designing extra stuff in for modders, right?

Odds, Ends, and Disclaimers
As mentioned atop, this is the bare minimum you need to know about load times. There are lots of other things you can optimize to make your loads suck less but I'll save that for another rant.

This has been a public service announcement paid for in part by the "Your Game Loads Too Slowly" foundation of Maryland and made possible by viewers like you!

Script-fu

2007-11-03T11:27:00.000-04:00

Not terribly long ago, I was a self-proclaimed scripting hater. "Oh sure," I said, "You can do some neat stuff in script-land with your not-real languages and your dynamic types. But wow, my C++ can do all of that and uber-more!" Yeah. So it's time to fess up and admit that I might have, ever so slightly, been somewhat mistaken on some 'a that.

I've had this completely irrational thing for Ruby for, oh, about a year now which mostly manifested itself as not doing Ruby. This (irrational thing for Ruby) is mostly the fault of the blogosphere, notably one Steve Yegge who, despite often being somewhat long winded with a propensity for ten cent words and compilers, is also quite often terribly amusing and a lot of the time spot on. He's got loads of stuff trumpeting the awesome that is Ruby. So I bought a book and read some online tutorials and then got a new job and moved cross country and got tied up in godawful amounts of stuff that's not ruby and wow is that a pretty laptop I should totally get one of those while not doing Ruby.

I used to know perl in much the same way that most people who knew (past tense) perl once did. That is to say, I have absolutely no ability to do perl now because a) it's very obtuse, b) it looks like line noise, and c) it's so unbelievably obtuse that sane human beings flee in terror when confronted with it. Have I mentioned its obtusitude?* Some have described Ruby as "perl with the suck removed" and as I mentioned before, I have a thing for Ruby.

<yet another entry for the worst segue ever category>

I'm now in charge of making load times not suck on my current project. I'd built a couple tools to build giant archive files and to parse in-game spew to do various things that are reasonable and useful toward that goal. I'd built them in C++. This in and of itself is not odd since by and large, I'm a C++ programmer. What I did notice is how godawful difficult seemingly simple things are in C++. This also is not odd since by and large, I'd been noticing that on and off for the last, say, decade. So moving from "hey, I think I can fix our load times" to "holy sweet moby jebus, I have to fix our load times!" I decided that I needed better tools.

Enter Ruby, stage left.

So I used it in a real "have to get this crap working right now kind of situation...and it was good.

So now I gotta take back some of the mean things I said about scripting languages and the people who promote them. Uncle already. I may have been a bit hasty with all of that. Ruby has made the otherwise unbelievably daunting data mangling tasks I've got slightly less unbelievably daunting because now at my very fingertips I have the power to mangle data like never before! Data the world around, tremble before my gemstone inspired might!

I'll save some gory details and horribly contrived examples from Teh Real World(TM) for a later date. So, if you're like me and only really ever looked at your primary statically-typed language for solving all manner of problems, you might go and pick up a scripting language just cause. It might save you some unbelievably daunting.

*obtusitude is not a real word. I made that up, honest.

HL2

2007-11-01T23:17:00.000-04:00

One of the (many) things I missed out on during my two year long stint in WoW is Half Life 2. Despite being told how uber-awesome it is, I never got it since at the time I didn't have enough machine to really play it. So beta for the Orange Box rolls around and my co-workers are playing TF2 and I hop on the bandwagon...just in time for them to lose interest (bastards). TF2 is plenty of fun on its own but it also gave me a chance to catch up on otherwise missed gaming (brilliant move by the Valve guys).

I wasn't prepared. Half Life 2 rocked my socks. There are definitely things about it that I didn't like but overall I thought it was an excellent game. Add to that the two free-to-me episodes 1 and 2 and it ended up being even more excellent. I missed the whole "better than sliced bread" launch so I had to judge it on its own merits and I still think it's by far the best single player game I've played in the better part of two years.

If you missed this one, aren't totally put off by jumping puzzles, and enjoy a good action FPS, I highly recommend it. Can't wait for Ep3.

Random or Not?

2007-10-04T23:02:00.001-04:00

Here's a not-quite-hypothetical problem: you have a fixed size graph and want to arrange N points on that graph in a random manner. You could use such a thing for lots of different stuff not limited to distributing player positions on a map, etc.

So how do you do it? Feel free to code along at home.

First try: completely random. We'll just use our good friend rand() with some "proper" seed to choose X and Y values and mod them into the map space. Smashing. If you do that, it looks something like those on the left.

I saw the results and wondered where my bug was cause that sure as crap doesn't look random. Hint: there was no bug.

Hokay. Welp, I don't want those points to be within N distance of one another where N is something I can calculate easily because, er, I want it to run fast (not because I'm lazy--no not that at all).

Closer...

If you were looking for a point, you may have just found it: when I say random in this particular context, really mean evenly distributed rather than really random. In fact, truly random is not what I want at all.

On the left here are my final results after a mess of hacky heuristics. It's not the prettiest code but it seems to give good results on every map I've generated and it has a calculable upper bound on computation time. As a final step not shown here, I jitter each position inside the grid line so even points that are on the same row or column on the grid appear a little less regular (left as an exercise for the reader).

Now, I freely admit that I'm one to run off and code something because a) I figure I might learn something, b) I need the practice, and c) I reall like coding. Try as I might I was unable to find a better solution than the hackery I came up with. Apparently my google-fu is not as righteous as I thought. I'm pretty convinced that there's some crazy technique to do this in like 3.47 instructions on a 68020 or whatever but I sure as crap can't find it. If anyone knows of one, let me know.

(If anyone wants the code, just ask.)

A Year of BEER

2007-10-01T20:20:00.000-04:00

Programming is pretty cool. It's one of the only disciplines where the tools are made of the same stuff the products are. In fact, the only other one I can name is blacksmithing and really, it's best that I don't try that one.

As of a couple weeks ago, the BEER engine is officially a year old. Sadly, I didn't notice until I went to update numbers for September. A good 35,000 lines and more than 200 hours later, I have to say that it's everything I wanted it to be and more. It's hard to say in objective terms how much I've learned in this endeavor and the (so far) three projects it's enabled, but I can say without hesitation that it's been a substantial amount.

I Like Oats

2007-09-17T19:19:00.001-04:00

If you take the oat, the whole oat, and take off the hull but leave the bran on and don't process it any further, you have a groat. When I eat groats I usually toast them in a little butter then simmer for at least 30 minutes. These are good but chewy and take a while to cook. They're good but take a lot of effort, sort of like brown rice. I hear they're good in haggis too, but I'm far too chicken to try one.

Scotch oats, Irish oats, or pinhead oats are what you get when you take a groat, remove the bran, then send it through steel cutters. These are also called steel cut oats. I love these: toast in butter until they smell nutty, then simmer for a while adding salt and cream at the end. What you get if you do this is a pretty awesome hot porridge which I think is pretty magical--tasty, kinda chewy, with a nice creamy texture even if you don't add dairy.

Take the same groats, remove the bran (usually), then mash 'em flat and you have rolled oats or "old fashioned" oats which is typically what we think of when someone says "oats". You can cook them in the microwave but they've lost the awesome; convenient but iffy. If I have to, this is what I buy when I want oats and can't find any steel cut oats or don't have the time to cook them (say, at work). These are great for things like oatmeal cookies and granola which I almost always make myself because it's a) dirt cheap, b) kinda fun, and c)I have a nut allergy.

"Can you process them more? Well, sure!"--Alton Brown

"Quick oats" are those that are cut, par-cooked, then mashed even flatter. They blow away in a stiff wind. They cook in a tiny fraction of the time, like a couple minutes of nukeage. They don't get nutty. They don't get creamy. They don't, in fact, taste all that good at all, these "instant oats". I'm not sure they're terribly good for much of anything beyond being convenient. I hate these and almost never buy them.

I almost never buy them. In an attempt to eat healthier, I bought a big carton of Quaker Oats. Guess which kind I got.

Free Software

2007-09-11T13:39:00.000-04:00

I'm always on the lookout for stuff that will make my computing experience better. And Lo! I have found not one, but two such things in times recent.

The first, is paint.net which is a wonderfully full featured image editor. It reminds me a lot of an ancient program I used to use called PhotoFinish crossed with an equally ancient version of Photoshop (3.0). It does layers and has an unlimited command history. Want the source code? BAM. How bout a blog with details of the development and business side? Got that too.

If only I'd known about this before I'd shelled big cashmoney for CSR2. MS Paint quakes in its boots in mortal terror.

The other one is ToDoList which is exactly what you might expect from a program of that name. As it turns out, this kind of thing is pretty rare in the software wild for whatever reason. This one has all manner of sorting and searching and you can set recurring tasks and priorities and all 'a that. It's swank. The only downside is that you'll need codeproject.com logins. Goodness lives here.

I'm using this to track features, bugs, and development of my home projects as well as tasks at work. And for those of you playing buzzword bingo: it stores its files as XML.

Beyond the Big Bang

2007-09-04T20:50:00.000-04:00

Spacetime. Nuts, isn't it? One thing, not two. You've probably heard of the guy who came up with this.

The History Channel seems to be at the end of it's series
The Universe, which is both fascinating and well written. If you have more than a passing interest in this kind of stuff, I highly recommend this series (yes, I just bought it).

Technology Gone Horribly, Horribly Wrong

2007-08-31T13:26:00.000-04:00

From my inbox:

As someone who has purchased or rated books by OpenGL Architecture Review Board, you might like to know that Red Letters: Living a Faith That Bleeds will be released on September 1, 2007. You can pre-order yours at a savings of $2.80 by following the link below.

I could be missing something here. I'm not properly caffeinated yet (yeah, it's Friday, give me a break already), but I gotta say: W. T. F.

I got this from Amazon. Amazon?!

Book DescriptionIn many Bibles, Christ's words are set apart with a red font. It should be obvious, but this distinction helps remind us that when God becomes Man and that Man speaks it's probably something we cannot afford to miss.

I can't make this shit up.

Elements of Computing Style

2007-08-09T13:23:00.000-04:00

Usual disclaimers apply here: I'm not an authority on, well, anything, so take away what you will from any of my postings.

I also fully realize that not everyone is a computer enthusiast of the same 7th dan that I am. I always expect to have specialized machines around to do whatever nefarious bidding I require and use specialization as a reason (excuse if you prefer) to have a bunch of machines around. So with that as a setup, I have to say that I vastly prefer small laptops. Or notebooks. Some people prefer "notebooks". Feel free to do the appropriate mental substitution. There's just something magnificent about a machine that you can take with you.

Aeronauts, Unite!
One Andy Carra is particularly more responsible for my views on laptops than most. He introduced me to this machine. Yeah, I know that it's far more en vogue to use a pop can for scale but, I, um, didn't have one. Luckily, MacGuyver isn't my patron saint for nothin'.

This was before I really understood hardware or how to make it go. The Compaq Contura Aero is a 486sx 33MHz with a base 4MB of memory expandable to 20MB (max). It came with a 170MB or so hard drive, a proprietary PCMCI floppy drive, and a 7.8" 640x480 16 color passive display LCD. It weighs in at about 4 pounds with a footprint of 10.25" x 7.5" x 1.5". It's a thing of beauty.

It's surprisingly solid for such a small machine with a plastic shell. The trackball is tiny but still manages to be usable. The screen is compact but still readable. It has no internal fan so it's completely silent beyond the hard drive and the clicking of the keys. When you use it for a while and it starts to get warm, it has a very distinct odor--not an unpleasant one, but also not one that you'd expect to come from a computer. Most of the other Compaqs that I've encountered over the years have been junk, so I usually refer to the Aero as the "Greatest of the Compaqs". I don't think you can sum up in words what all makes the Aero cool, but if you sit down to use one, you know right away that it's a quality machine.

I bought one and modded it. It should be noted that the guts of the Aero were never intended to be mucked with by mere mortals. At some point I broke the infamous right hinge. For a short while anyway, I held the record for the biggest hard drive ever put into the tiny Aero (6GB circa about Y2K). I can't be mad at the guy who beat my "record" since he put up a kick-ass site about the Aero.

I still have this machine and it still works. It currently dual boots Win95 OSR2 and OpenBSD 2.8 (I think). Watch this space! for future hackeries with this, one of my favoritest machines.

Dark Sony Days
My first laptop was a godawfully heavy 13.3" Toshiba Satellite which I bought in grad school. It was (roughly) 12 pounds which doens't sound heavy unless you need to carry it around all day and with textbooks. With the right clutch of my Aero out and sans a battery that could run it for more than 15 minutes, I really really wanted another machine that I could take with me. At the time, and I did my homework for this one, the Thinkpads and the Vaios were the big names in subnotebooks. I bought a Vaio and it served me well. Specifically, a PCG R505DL boasting an at the time impressive 1GHz P3, 30GB hard drive, and 384MB of main memory. It's got a 12.1" 1024x768 passive display and sans docking station, weighs in at roughly 3 pounds.

This Vaio is a lot larger than the Aero but at the time, I don't think that Sony sold a smaller one (10" screen) with the appropriate power for a reasonable sum. It's a very full featured machine with a single PCMCIA slot, a DVD/CDRW, a floppy drive, built in Ethernet, a couple USB ports, and a Sony memory stick slot that I've used exactly twice in seven years. The dock and battery can be hotswapped in Windows if you're so inclined.

For as sleek and thin as the machine is, it's amazingly solid. The corners don't give, and you don't have to baby it to move it around. The base with all its ports is nice for folks who want to leave the optional bits hooked up to a workstation and take the machine for strolls. The base itself isn't terribly heavy so if you want to take the entire thing on a trip, it's not a big deal. The keyboard is compact but not too tiny to type on effectively and has a really nice feel. As an interesting data point to that effect, I think I've written more code on my Vaio than on any other machine I've ever owned including two engines and probabaly seven games/prototypes/tech demos.

It's a good machine, and I'm a little sad to be retiring it. Except that it means I have a new machine.

Humanizing Technology
With the sale of my house in Wisconsin, and a burning desire to buy something cool, I bought one of these. It's 10.6" x 7.5" x 0.9" with an 11.1" 1366x768 display and weighs in at less than 4 pounds. It's a low voltage core 2 duo and currently has 1GB of ram and a 120GB hard drive. The memory upgrade is already on the way though I suspect it'll be a while before I try to replace the drive (solid state drives need to come down in price a bunch).

Now, I'll be the first one to say that I was skeptical about the leather binding thing as well as Asus' current marketing campaign, but I have to say that the S6Fm is a high quality machine and it really wouldn't seem as cool without it. They really went out of their way to make it exceptional and that's something I can definitely appreciate.

Given that there are exactly two machines that fit my specifications available right now, I think I made the right choice. I thought that the price was high until I received it and found that with the machine I also got:
- a high capacity battery in addition to the normal one
- a matching optical mouse
- a mess of accessories which are by no means necessary, but definitely very thoughtful of them to have included

It's light, solid, and reasonably powerful for its size. Everything is built in and modern. I've got very few complaints. Course, I did just buy it and I haven't really had a lot of time to get used to it either, but I'm happy to have found an appropriate spiritual successor to my beloved Aero.

One House Off the Market

2007-08-01T21:01:00.000-04:00

In a stunning display of complete and utter ineptitude, my house is now officially off the market. I'll save up the ranty goodness for another day because right now, I hold in my hands a check the size of which I've only seen once (not coincidentally, when I sold my last home).

Like any good geek coming into a pile of money, visions such as these now fill my every waking moment.

Hack: Impossible?

2007-07-26T20:22:00.000-04:00

[insert theme music here]

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to hack the following upgrade card into a workable machine sizing less than a breadbox and drawing under 50 watts of power at idle. Said machine should be capable of running OpenBSD 4.1 as a server or WinXP.

The target: one Powerleap upgrade card. Model: PL-Renaissance/R370S fitted with a 256MB stick of PC-133 SDRAM and an Intel 733MHz Pentium III Coppermine processor.

You have as much time as you need and a budget of $200. Beyond that, you may scrounge for parts around your workshop.

Good luck.

Old Hardware

2007-07-17T23:16:00.000-04:00

Most of the people who read here know me well enough that this isn't a surprise, but for everyone else out there: I have a problem with obsolete computer hardware.

The problem is that I seem to accumulate it at an alarming rate (i.e., greater than zero) and have a real hard time getting rid of it. Currently I own seventeen machines in various states of disrepair. The vast majority of those are functioning but without a real purpose. I never take a machine that I don't intend to use for some purpose of varying nefariousness and while I did use most of them, most of those uses are no longer necessary. That makes me sad, not in the least because I get bitten by the "must have new hardware" bug about every four months.

I don't think there's anything that depreciates in value quite like computer hardware except maybe automobiles and my stock options. Computer equipment just doesn't die that often if you take care of it. Oh sure, you'll have a hard drive or two die but for most parts just don't stop doin' they thang. Some of my (vast) collection I still have uses for but that leaves about a dozen machines I need to offload.

This is where y'all come in. I need help getting rid of these but I'm particular about where they should go. I don't want them in a landfill; I want them in the hands of someone who will put them to use doing whatever or at the very least recycled. So if you know of a good or even slightly disfunctional home that could use an old machine or three, drop me a line.

Betterer Followup

2007-07-11T10:29:00.000-04:00

Don't try this at home. Make sure you download the full version (about 30 megs) rather than just watching the preview.

And if you absolutely must watch it in crappy low rez, well, I feel for ya, but here ya go. You won't get a lot of the more subtle effects; just sayin'.

No hobbits were harmed in the making of this film.

Bad Followup

2007-07-02T13:03:00.000-04:00

As it turns out, I've been kind of busy lately, but not with anything that could have prevented me from posting something meaningful here. I just didn't know how to follow the last one. So here's a whirlwind update of what's gone on in the last two months.

Stuff:
- Looks like I'm finally selling my house in Madison
- I'm finally able to exercise my Activision stock options
- Got my fast machine in a proper case
- Playing Civ IV (for obvious reasons)
- Played Vanguard
- Played LOTRO

The last two are deserving of posts of their own which I'll leave for another day. The first two mean I don't have to eat ramen and mac&cheese every day (assuming all goes well, anyway).

Also: tasteh.

That is all.

Thoughts of WoW

2007-05-03T22:44:00.000-04:00

If you don't like long posts, you can stop reading now. It might get a little sappy in here: you have been warned.

I'm in the process of fixing, reinstalling, rearranging, etc. all my machines. On this particular machine (laptop) I found the WoW videos I'd downloaded seemingly ages ago. In the process of going through them deciding which to keep and which to toss, my thoughts were again drawn to far away Azeroth.

I played nigh unto religiously for a really, really long time but only now many months after calling it quits have I finally come to terms with it. At one point I changed servers to Greymane with a few good friends. We were kind of fed up with all the BS that goes along with dealing with people and just wanted to have fun again. At some point we got into PvP and did a whole lot of it.

This time around, I played a mage which is pretty atypical of me; I usually play tanks or healers and had just come off a year gig as a paladin (yeah, sorry). For those who haven't played WoW, mages can be kind of squishy and for a good spell in the 30s and 40s brackets, I had been having kind of crappy luck and really seriously considered rerolling or finally quitting for good. I mean, shit, it had been a year and a half and it's not like I didn't get my money's worth.

I don't remember where I found it (probably the uber-useless mage boards) but I found this video and everything changed. Cliche, but true. I mean, jeez, that guy rocked. He has some serious gear to be sure, and a build that's all about making highlight reels, but still--daaamn. I figured I'd never see that kind of gear ever (I was wrong) but if you could do that, then it was something to shoot for; something far beyond the doom and gloom of the mage boards.

I respecced, busted up to 49 and we hung out there for a good couple months and went pretty much undefeated. I even made a PvP video (I'd link it here, but FileFront isn't playing nice this evening). We met a lot of great people and had a mess of fun. And little did I know it at the time, but that was the platform upon which the rest of our success would be built.

Me, Zura, and Vain were the last of the few that came from our previous server. If you look close, it's us three and a couple others in group 2. Despite my rantings and ravings and general malaise, they stuck with me (for better, I'd say). We did a lot of awesome things and got a lot further than anyone thought we would, myself included. These were the folks I counted on to stay sane when nothing was going right (pretty frequently, as I remember) and who sadly took most of the brunt of my bad calls (of which there were many).

This particular shot was just as we'd gotten some success in raiding; before it got too busy to PvP often. This was the second match we'd won after I dinged Exalted with the Defilers so I was sportin' some nice shoulders and an Ironbark: some of my first epics. Greymane was pretty godawfully one sided; if you smacked an alliance weenie real good, they'd just about rain epics like a goddamn pinata. It was terribly frustrating to lose because they had better gear which made our wins over such teams that much more satisfying. For months I'm sure I grated on folks nerves with: "What are those chumps gonna do when we start gettin' epics?" The above screenie contains the answer.

This is me and Hypo kicking ass in AV. The thing to realize is that even though the horde in general had better PvPers, they almost never showed up to AV once they got their shineys and the alliance (in general) had way better gear. The end result is that we lost a lot--but we looked damn fine doing it. I owe the top part of whatever skill I had to Hypo since he always pushed me to play better than I really could. He's an uber mage; probably the best I ever played with. Favorite story: at one point he respecced to fire like I was when we were working through MC to up our raid DPS.

This is probably one of my favorite raid shots. We had our raid firsts of Ragnaros and Onyxia pretty close together which established our position of prominence on our server. What you can't see in that shot is how we struggled through personnel issues when we couldn't get 30 people together to do a big raid or doing Lucifron shorthanded with only two priests (sorry, but you kind of have to know that encounter for the significance of that to sink in). You don't see the hours of frustration as we wiped due to server lag or just plain bad luck or the infighting that eventually drove the group to split up after I'd gone. You don't see the blood sweat and tears that went into the organization or the flak that we took for "just a game".

In the end, you don't see a lot of things in that shot, but that's the HRG I remember, the one I led: mature, determined, unstoppable.

My days as a mage came and went--memories that I might not have had if I hadn't found that one video. I met a lot of great people, many of whom I'm still in touch with today. Maybe Azeroth isn't as far away as I thought.

...So I Built It Out of Legos

2007-05-02T21:27:00.001-04:00

Carry on.

Hazards of the Infrequent

2007-04-29T22:08:00.000-04:00

A long (long) time ago, I did 3D modelling. It was a long forgotten day when my 386 with its 16MB of system memory and 4.2GB of disk was a serious amount of computing power.

By today's standards it's pretty weak, but in a day when hardware acceleration hadn't quite reached consumers it was pretty awesome.

Hazard: I have these stored in RD4 format (I upgraded). Nothing in the modern era seems to be able read these files. God knows that even if I had an install disk for the program that made those that it'd be a miracle to get a machine together that will even run it.

The good news: the files are in ASCII. The bad news: the format was written by a "real programmer" and is unintelligible. Yeah. Awesome.

Sooo....my options are looking like:

fiddle through the data to try to piece together the geometry

keep looking for something that can import them

rebuild the models from the source sketches assuming I can find them

Woo.

Half a Rant

2007-04-19T14:47:00.000-04:00

I got a package today. This has learned me four things:
- the mail carrier chick is hot
- either my angry calls to the post office or my judiciously applied handwritten nametag worked
- my doorbell also works (didn't know I had one, the random assortment of pizza doods that have been here always knock)
- my legos are no longer lost in the mail

That would be all except for my half a rant.

I spent two days trying to get Linux installed on a spare machine to be a) a non-windows platform to cross compile on, b) an always on place I can drop the multitude of files I want to keep, c) an X server I can break (no X on my firwall). Gentoo did not play nice. This morning after many hours of not being able to get xorg and fluxbox installed properly, I got pissed off and installed OpenBSD instead. It was installed with X before lunch with xorg and fluxbox no less.

Gentoo definitely seemed cool after about an eight year hiatus from anything Linux. If I cared more about the operating system, I probably could have spent another couple days getting it to work. Then I realized that I'm old and cranky and have got better things to do and...hey! Durn kids! Get off my lawn!

Adventures With Legos, Part 1

2007-04-18T15:27:00.000-04:00

This one is dedicated to Mr. Brian's weiner cat who sadly can't play with legos due to a distinct lack of opposable thumbs.

Step 1: Pretend to be able to draw with any kind of perspective (yes, the torso part was hacked from a different scan to save your eyes some pain).

Step 2: Get drunk off your rocker and watch TV for five days straight in a pile of legos. Kids: get your parents' permission first!

Step 3: Build:

Depending on which one you saw first and/or your particular loyalties to the respective brands, this is either:
RFL3N-Rifleman from Classic Battletech

==OR==
Raidar X Battloid from Robotech

==OR==
ADR-04-Mk.X Destroid Defender from Macross

I swear that I've run across a blurb about how FASA settled in court with the Macross doods on Classic Battletech but for the life of me, I can't find it now.

Action pose!

And just in case you think I'm way out there, this dood will actually sell you a lego mech.

Stupid Ebay Tricks

2007-04-06T22:11:00.000-04:00

A sane person might think that paying rent in one state, mortgage in another, and being out of work for the better part of a month would prevent me from buying crap on Ebay.

Ebay is evil; that is all.

Now Reporting LIVE From Maryland

2007-04-02T17:13:00.000-04:00

For those wondering: I did indeed make it though not in record time. That said, I'm pretty glad I took two days to make the trip with a totally loaded car than just doing it in one.

Since arriving in town late afternoon yesterday I've scouted out the appropriate places:
- an appropriate establishment to buy beer
- a place I can get food
- the local EB Games
- Chipotle

The cable doods were here this afternoon and I've appropriated one 72"x30" folding table and a folding chair on the cheap so it's almost like civilization again.

I Hate Moving

2007-03-29T23:29:00.000-04:00

So Monday they came and took most of my stuff. That means I have no chairs or tables which means that I've been either sitting on the floor or standing for the last five days (ow). Even worse yet, today the carpet cleaner guys came and things won't be dry until sometime tomorrow. So now I can't even sit on the carpet anymore and I've had to relocate my sleeping accomodations to the kitchen (hey, it was either that or the bathroom).

Fun. And by that I mean "not".

I'm so buying furniture when I get the keys.

Moving Miscalculation

2007-03-25T16:02:00.000-04:00

Today the movers came and got all of the stuff that I won't be tossing, putting in storage, or taking in my tiny little car. The house is now mostly devoid of anything but dirt, spiders, and cobwebs--perfect for the kind of cleaning that I need to do (well, minus the spiders anyway). The bad part, the miscalculation from the title, is that I have neither a proper desk, nor a proper chair, and my microwave is now on a semi bound for Florida. I have no idea why Florida is on the way to Maryland but hey, I don't drive a truck either.

So I can't really warm things up to eat without firing up the stove and my back is rapidly cramping thanks to the contortion that I'm doing to type and see the screen.

I had a grand plan of cleaning and playing a few days of Supreme Commander. The cleaning part is sadly unavoidable, the last part I just don't see happening anymore.

850 miles is a hella long way

2007-03-18T22:49:00.000-04:00

It's 850ish miles from Madison WI to Towson MD for anyone who's interested. That's a long goddamn way. I managed to make it in roughly 13 hours including stops (tolls, food, etc). I've done this kind of driving before; it's about the same distance from Fairfax VA to Madison as well--yet another set of one day drives I don't recommend to anyone.

How did I make it so fast? Suffice to say that if I had gotten just one ticket for every state I travelled through today, that the total citation sum would be two to three times as much as I'm paying to stay at this crappy hotel for two nights. At least the hotel has wireless.

I think I'm going to pass out now.

Daylight Savings Sucks

2007-03-12T11:15:00.001-04:00

...and I get to do it again in another month when I move from CST to EST...again.

That is all.

Moving

2007-03-10T17:55:00.000-05:00

It occurs to me that I've neglected a couple of things. The first is that I'm switching jobs and moving cross country (again). The second is that this is the reason I've not finished February's game or done another thousander club update. This isn't probably news for the majority of people who read here, but for everyone else: now ya know.

The majority of February was spent studying, interviewing, making plans, and generally being very nervous about the whole thing. This is not conducive to getting any real work done. March is so far going about the same as February minus the studying and interviewing parts but with the addition of furious cleaning and fixing of my house to make it more marketable.

Selling my house is going to be a pain; I imagine that it always is. Dealing with the pile of crap that my dad made me take now that he's in his "get your shit out of my house" phase is also going to be a pain. Normally, I'd agree with him since it's my junk, after all. This is fine as long as there's space to put said shit, but moving from a 3 bedroom w/basement and garage house to a 1 or 2 bedroom apartment is already unfun. So I'm going through stuff and seeing what I can toss and otherwise get rid of as much as I can stand.

I will very likely need both storage here in Wisconsin for the stuff my dad can't pick up but still wants (my parents are in their Arizona home at the moment) and in Maryland where I'm landing because I'm going to have roughly 1/3 the space I currently do. Yay. House selling issues asside, I'd rather not be paying rent as well on storage space.

Probably the biggest difference than the last time I moved is that I'm probably going to go with movers this time. I just don't want to drive a big honkin' truck through Pennsylvania again. I'm hoping like hell that this is going to be within my budget and that they don't destroy my otherwise already destroyed stuff. Maybe I should hope that they don't destroy it any more than it's already destroyed.

Total Annihi...er...Supreme Commander

2007-03-04T17:07:00.000-05:00

Way back before the dawn of time (i.e., the year 2000) I played a mess of RTS games. One of the most notable of these was Starcraft which I played an undue amount of. What killed it for me was when I realized that I was losing matches because I didn't micromanage the first minute well enough. That sucks.

Enter Total Annihilation.

I dunno if the time was right or whatever but I ended up playing even more TA than I did Starcraft and I never really bored of it (just got distracted with other games, then jobs). In fact, from the time I started playing TA, I've upgraded my main machine in these denominations over the last decade or so: Celeron 300A, PIII 733, Athlon 1333, P4 2533. Each of these has subsequently been ground to a screeching halt by that one game released in 1997 and modded to the moon and back. And it's still fun. Lots of people didn't like TA, however, because it was less action, more strategy, and was 3D rendered in software right around the time that everything had to be 3D accelerated.

Enter Supreme Commander.

Supreme Commander (for those who have no idea what I'm talking about) is the spiritual successor to TA headed by the same dood (one Chris Taylor, not to be confused with my recent student of the same name) but at a different company and with uber modern requirements. I suppose that as a true spiritual successor, it will need to bring yet another three generations of machines to its knees and by all accounts it does so.

So after having pre-ordered it, I built a new machine. In fact, I got the game before I got the parts. The final upgrade straw was that my old machine wouldn't ever have enough video card to run the game (GeForce 6 minimum). This is the first reasonably cutting edge machine I've ever owned to the tune of about $2K (running Vista, but that's a rant for another day). I built it yesterday, got it all configured and downloaded and patched and almost usable and went to play Supreme Commander for the first time. After roughly ten years of antitipation I've now been stuck in the patching portion (done in the background) for, oh, the last two hours. On a blazingly fast machine. That was built specifically to play this game. On my extra premium 3Mbit connection that's normally really nice.

I'm convinced that the universe hates me.

Just a Bit

2007-02-25T20:39:00.000-05:00

How much snow did we get, you ask? Ho boy.

Never in my life have I moved more snow in one day and remember that where I grew up, we stick spigots in trees.

This was my front door this morning.

I caught the culprit in action. I didn't get a shot of the other machine but it was pretty awesome too.

This is the left side if you're looking out my front door, checkin' out the uber corner there. My study's window looks out that way if I ever had it not shaded. Note the position of the fire hydrant and how far up it the snow goes.

In this shot, you can barely see my mailbox. Don't worry, it gets worse. On the left of my mailbox, you might not notice my driveway. This was before that other gigantic machine pushed a neck high pile into the bottom there.

So, there's your begin pictures. It might look cold out there and it was, just not as cold as it has been. In fact, I spent most of the next five hours clearing without a coat on. Never in my life have I been more happy that I'm covered in a layer of insulative blubber.

Being realtively warm outside had the benefit of making the snow sticky so it tended to stay where I put it. This also means that there's probably not going to be a lot of drifting--an uber good thing for tomorrow. The bad news is that it was wet. Hella wet. That means heavy and I've got the back strain to prove it.

Note the hydrant on the right. Also note that my lazy neighbors couldn't clear their sidewalk (pansies).

Somewhere in there, I have a mailbox. Hopefully I can't get fined for that.

I Hate Winter

2007-02-24T19:45:00.000-05:00

Seriously, I hate it. For those not in the know right now, the midwest is under siege from winter and it's not supposed to stop until late next week (stupid winter).

I left for my class as is my saturday habit at ohgoditsearly o'clock and almost got stuck. Odd, though, because the snowplow doods hadn't done their dumping on my drive yet. Arriving home at just before 4:00 this afternoon, shock, then amusement, then horrification played over my face in what I can only assume is a suitably comic manner. I was too busy being shocked, then amused, then horrified to properly notice.

Sadly, instead of just taking off the top layer like they've done all season long, the doods did two passes--one for the top layer, one for the harder, dirtier, nastier crap that gets packed down when you drive over it. Might I add that this is the heavier bit.

To add insult to injury, they'd also managed to run what I can only assume was a frontloader up onto my curb depositing yet another waist high pile of the aforementioned heavy snow onto the corner of my lot. Now, for those who don't live in the fine state of Wisconsin, as a resident of the City of Madison, I'm required (by law) to clear the sidewalks in their entirety within 12 hours of snowfall lest I get fined. They don't give warnings. I have a corner lot.

Half an hour later, I deposit my car in its rightful place in my garage. An hour and a half after that, and I fulfill my duty to the City of Madison for another day (ow), at least until it snows like crazy again tonight. And tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after that. And the day after that. And if we're lucky, the day after that. That's right, kids, it's supposed to snow every day up until and including Thursday.

Note that my driveway is not clean. Oh no. They won't fine me for not clearing my driveway. When I was done, though, you coulda eaten off that sidewalk. And now, a mere two hours later, it's already covered again.

I'm so moving somewhere tropical.

Roddenberry & Lucas

2007-02-19T23:09:00.000-05:00

These days I don't watch a lot of TV and don't see many movies but that wasn't always the case. In fact, I whiled away many a youthful hour locked up in the vivid scenes conjured from someone else's imagination. Most of those years have been subsequently locked up away from my own prying eyes in the bustle of daily existance. So well, it seems, that I can barely recall much of my pre-college days--probably for the best.

It's been a long weekend (thankfully) and I caught two shows on the History Channel. Yesterday was Star Wars: Empire of Dreams. Today was Star Trek: Beyond the Final Frontier. I don't know what it was about those two productions but it reminded me of the wonder I had of cinema and TV that I've all but forgotten. Maybe it was Wil Wheaton's Blog which I discovered a couple months ago (it's on the must-read list). Maybe it was his commentary on ST:TNG. I dunno.

The prevailing theme through all of that was that those two pieces of fiction changed the world. I'm not sure that anyone who lived in this country who were at least as tangentially aware of popular culture as I am would argue against that. So what happened? The only thing I can think of that comes even close was the Lord of the Rings trilogy but even that was written a really long time ago (I doubt many people realize that it was originally written in the WW2 era). Are we so focused on the glitz and the glam that we've lost track of the bigger picture?

I don't know when the hell it was that I got old, but I find myself longing for simpler times; the kind of times that I barely remember.

A Tale of Pastries And Danger

2007-02-07T00:01:00.000-05:00

Unless something terrible happens this month, I'll be building a game (yeah, I decided). Here is a snippet from the design doc:

3.1: The Story
You play the part of Thomas Eugene Howard Chuck, otherwise known as T.E.H. Chuck.

T.E.H. Chuck is Head Cakey Taster at the Intergalactic Cakey Tastes Corporation and has just been asked to oversee the Chocolate Covered Sponge Cake (With Tasty Cream Filling) plant on Alpha Nebulon 3. Alpha Nebulon 3 has a large native population that sustains itself on the very tasty chocolate veins that run through the planet; hence the Chocolate Covered Sponge Cake (With Tasty Cream Filling) plant located there.

The good news is that since chocolate is available in a mining state in great quantity, that it greatly reduces ICTC’s production costs and allows for a large degree of automation. The bad news is that the indigenous inhabitants of Alpha Nebulon 3 are both extremely hostile and not very happy about the corporation stealing their foodstuffs . Hence, any ICTC personnel found in the field tend to meet a terrible fate.

The plant on Alpha Nebulon 3 is in a remote area near a particularly rich chocolate deposit but the rest of the planet is undeveloped. Luckily, the surveyors left limited range transporters around in random places that can be used to move back and forth between the survey areas. Not so luckily, ICTC, in a further attempt to reduce costs, had the sentry guard systems in areas around the transporters installed by interns who weren’t very careful. So instead of installing a sentry guard system to protect the loyal employees of the ICTC, they instead ended up installing a veritable obstacle course of deadly disposition that isn’t quite smart enough to pick out human targets to not neutralize.

On the way to the plant, T.E.H. Chuck crashed his large shiny black sport utility spacecraft on Alpha Nebulon 3 while backing up trying to park. Luckily, the ship crashed a short distance away from the plant. Not so luckily, it was a short distance for a spacecraft which is quite a long distance for a Head Cakey Taster through a dangerous environment filled with hostile creatures who dislike the whole “stealing their food” bit.

Baked Beans; Avocados

2007-02-04T14:47:00.000-05:00

I realize that few of y'all cook...but...

If you cook and you like baked beans, you should totally go out and get a crock pot and make a batch, right now. Google has a veritable cornucopia of recipes vying for your attention. The batch I got going right now includes maple syrup because, hey, I like maple. I'm almost convinced that if slow cookers didn't end up with food at some point that they'd qualify as bona fide torture devices.

Also, avocados rule.

That is all.

1KClub Update

2007-02-02T21:40:00.000-05:00

January started out pretty good but ended up kind of flat. This month's contribution broken down by category:

44 hours: BEER updates

7 hours: GWA updating (to reflect BEER updates)

4 hours: artwork

12 hours: studying advanced topics

Total: 67/83.33
Grade: B-

That's not so good.

I could make a bunch of lame excuses but it's not like I didn't kill at least 15 hours in front of the TV instead of doing something productive. I'm going to try to do better this month.

The good news is that I've finally received my small fortune worth of software. Well, most of it. I hope to be moving to VC2K5 and Photoshop CS2 very soon. I don't know that it will help my productivity (in fact, if I'm honest, I expect it to hurt), but it makes me feel better so that's something.

For this month, I was planning on doing a game. I should, but I'm on the fence about spending another month refactoring BEER which would certainly be beneficial.

OMGWTFWireless

2007-01-28T22:52:00.000-05:00

I hooked up my wireless again for the first time in roughly 6 years. I have no idea how I lived without it.

That is all.

Mmm....Paaaaah

2007-01-27T18:32:00.000-05:00

Forgot to upload this last weekend when I made them. These would be no-bake chocolate mousse pie. There's a thin layer of ganache at the bottom and a thick layer of mousse on the top. They were pretty awesome. I just thought I'd share.

WoW Drama

2007-01-11T23:30:00.000-05:00

I learned today that the group of friends I left behind in WoW who subsequently guilded has broken up. Even though I've been gone for about 3.5 months, I'm still pretty shaken by it all. So suitably, I'm more than a little drunk right now but if/when I gather my thought sufficiently, I'll write up something more meaningful.

Edit: I've decided against making a follow up post. Maybe sometime in the unforseeable future.

Thousander Club

2007-01-07T12:00:00.000-05:00

The Thousander Club is a challenge issued last year by some of the folks at the Low Poly Coop based on an article on GBGames. Original article here with 2007 followup here. The basics of the article was that you need roughly 10,000 hours over the course of 10 years to achieve basic mastery of a subject. Numbers aside, this doesn't seem unreasonable so long as those putting in the time are actually trying to learn, get better, don't get their brains smooshed by aliens or whatever. So the Thousander Club is a group of people trying to put 1K hours into their choice of things to practice while posting their progress in a public place.

I ran into this last year and was fascinated by it, but the ups and downs of stuff and the lateness in the year (Octoberish) meant that I wouldn't put up big numbers. I did manage to log 187 hours total from September 14th to December 31st, notably the first day of BEER development and the last day of GWA. So this year I've thrown my hat in the ring with these guys to see what I can do. I expect that this will be a hard year working two jobs and working through a year of crunch so, sadly, I already forecast a pretty major failure to hit 1000. Nonetheless, it'll be an adventure and I'm looking forward to it.

GWA2006 Release

2007-01-02T15:21:00.000-05:00

I ended up not finishing the postmortem until very late and wanted to read it over when not falling asleep. Here are two links that you can use to download the game and/or the docs courtesy of filefront:

Download gwa_v100.zip from FileFront!
Download gwa_docs.zip from FileFront!

The first is just version 1.00 of the game (about 1MB). The second contains the original design doc, the annotated design doc, and the postmortem in MS Word .doc files.

Excerpts from the postmortem, "Lessons Learned":
- Reliable and expedient tools are a MUST.
- Keeping the deadline in mind when evaluating new systems is crucial.
- Being able to throw features out or rework them is key.
- Reinventing the wheel is a lost cause.

January will be off of doing a game; I need some time to finish up some housework and to fix some of the issues of my engine. I expect to try again in February.

Happy New Year

2007-01-01T13:50:00.000-05:00

Welp, another year has come and gone. Here's hoping that y'all had an awesome holiday season this time 'round.

I know it's a tradition to list your New Year's Resolutions somewhere (like, say, your blog) but I'm not going to. Oh no. Given my past track record for sticking to them (exactly 0.000%), I'm not going to jinx it. Instead, I'll be keeping them private, thanks much, in order that I might actually accomplish some of it. Though, to be painfully honest, they're the same things I've been working toward for a while so it's not like you're missing any huge bold statements or anything.

For the few people that are wondering how last month's project went, I present the following screen shots:

If all goes well, I'll be following this post with a download link and more information. Contained within "more information" would be a postmortem of the project selections of which will be posted here. Also therein will be two versions of the design doc, one as designed, and one old version annotated with my notes.

Happy Holidays

2006-12-21T23:09:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow I'll be driving back to my parents' place in Kalamazoo Michigan. Yes, it's a real place. My holidays are typefied by eating far too much, seeking refuge from an overblaring TV, suffering my two hefty siblings for extended periods of time, and almost invariably getting sick from overexposure to allergens. Ah yes, the holidays.

Despite the fact that I've unilaterally failed to get anything done in the time I've spent at my parents' place, I'm bringing my laptop in order to get some serious work done on this month's game. Given that this month I've been overworked and sick as heck, I haven't gotten much of anything done. So if it's going to get done within the allotted amount of time, some serious work is going to need doing in the next week. Barring any unfortunate mishaps I'll be back home a couple days before New Year's so that the remainder of my sanity might, er, remain.

Here's wishing everyone out there a happy holidays.

Security and Firewalls

2006-12-12T12:28:00.000-05:00

For the last few weeks, someone has been trying to break into my firewall machine. The obvious clues that I've been left are that this guy is trying to log in unsuccessfully through SSH as "root", "spam", and "webadmin" which is more than a little concerning. So far as I know, they've been unsuccessful but I'm not enough of a hacker to be certain. My firewall machine is pretty good--it's an obscure operating system that's pretty secure on its lonesome and out of the box it will foil most attempts. Even then, it's low power, isn't connected to anything remotely interesting, and exists on a consumer line. Still, it bothers me that anyone would even attempt to break in for any reason, nefarious or otherwise.

I tightened things up a bit yesterday but I doubt that will deter them. I'll probably buy the latest version of that OS and get that all prettied up. It makes me glad that I had the presence of mind to use a real operating system for a firewall.

A New Tack

2006-12-10T13:50:00.000-05:00

Tacking is a maneuver that sailing vessels do to put the wind on the other side of the boat. This is often used to move against the direction of the wind.

My new tack then, is to build a bunch of simple games and then release them for free in an attempt to improve my skills. This obviously isn't ideal since I'd still lose out on learning about all the marketing things and project->product transformations. This does, however, seem to be OK in the light of the corporate copyright law under which I toil.

This guy tries to do a game a month. Gamasutra has some info on how to prototype in under a week (with additional bonus track commentary at Lost Garden). These guys make a game in a day. Kloonigames in that top link has a couple great posts with links to other rapid prototyping resources.

I'm going to try to prototype something each month and post it somewhere for free. I hope that this will get me some of what I'm looking for. It might not be pretty and almost certainly won't be polished but it'll be something which is better than slacking off.

So for my first game, I'm going to rebuild this:
This is GWAGL, the example game I built when exploring the info in
Scott Bilas's GDC Talk in 2002 about data driven game objects. It's even a rebuild of the arcade game I did in college for the one games class I took (I can't post a screenshot of that because it doesn't run anymore). I'm going to pretty it up some, make it a single player game, and bang it out before the end of this year barring any unforseen badness. I might even post updates on how it's going here (but don't hold your breath).

So here we go.

The World In Crisis!

2006-11-29T18:27:00.000-05:00

DHMO is something that most of us are in contact with on a daily basis, but we often don't consider the dangers. It has now come to my attention that there exists one UEAC DHMO Research Division, a group of upstanding citizens looking out for our best interests. Just as a snippet of the data within, did you know that...
- DHMO can cause death even in small quantities when inhaled
- Prolonged exposure to DHMO can cause severe tissue damage and burns
- DHMO is a major component of acid rain
- DHMO leads to corrosion and oxidation of many metals
- DHMO is often associated with disasters such as hurricanes and other disasters
- DHMO is present in the vast majority of beverages
- DHMO is found in substantial quantity wherever people live

But here at Ruminations of a Wanderer, we're not all about sensationalism and scare tactics. Well, ok, maybe just a little. We prefer you to Make Up Your Own Damn Mind (TM). For those who don't like clicky text links, the upstanding citizens at dhmo.org have provided us ith the following banner:

Programming Evil #143

2006-11-28T11:40:00.000-05:00

I hope everyone had a good holiday weekend but that's not why we're here. Oh no. We're here to talk about programming evils and in true rant style I'm going to number these but not in any rational way.

I've found a simple piece of code that seems benign enough (details hidden to protect the guilty):


byte buffer[ BUFFER_SIZE ];
sprintf( buffer, "map_path/%s", szGetMapName() );

Astute readers might note that if szGetMapName() happens to return a really big name or a NULL, that bad things might happen to the game. Me, in an attempt to be a good worker bee and concerned with security, decided I'd change it thusly:


byte buffer[ BUFFER_SIZE ];
snprintf( buffer, sizeof(buffer), "map_path/%s", szGetMapName() );

except that this now errors out on every overrun rather than crashing. Better, but still not what I was going for. Note that standard C snprintf does not error out or anything weird. It is, in fact, quite a well-behaved function. We've overridden snprintf to our own crazy version of snprintf that errors on buffer overflow. Our version is not quite so well-behaved.

I hereby christen this as Programming Evil #143: If you override standard functions, don't change the functionality!

In this particular case, the chance of buffer overrun is almost nil and the function played by szGetMapName() can't return NULL and the define played by BUFFER_SIZE is pretty big making it exceptionally hard to overrun it. Regardless, I wanted to make it more bulletproof--an attempt that has been quite thwarted.