Three Games I Can't Face (Again)

Three games I often think about, but which I could never return are raising their heads with me lately, the first being Eve-Online.

I was invited back by a friend, whom wanted me and my three decently trained (for 2012) accounts to go back in to the game, and run mining operations for him.  If you're not aware, mining in Eve is pretty much staring at rocks, you have to be in a special place, and busy with other stuff to let your game time turn into this monotony.

He assured me there's loads of new stuff, "since you like mined Xel, there's loads"... But my heart just wasn't in it.  I did install the game, and try a free account for like 25 minutes, until I got utterly bored with it and had to stop.

My main problem is probably the style of game play, I loved Eve, I played way back before the new engine.  It was a clicky menu fest then, and it seems twice as much so now.

Though I still love the Armageddon!

The next is World Of Warcraft, I don't often get invited back to WoW nowadays, but when I initially quit I was asked perhaps every other day.  With the release of the movie however, my interested was peaked, and so I took a look... 

What have they done to my beloved Stormwind?

I just can't, I can't face it.  But I look back on my appearance on "Shut Up We're Talking" (which incidentally spawned this very blog) and I remember saying that damage & level inflation would devalue and dumb down the game... Boy, was I right, or was I right?

The third, and final one, is CubeWorld.  I was big into this when it came out, I begged a friend to lend me his account before I bought it (which he wouldn't - *cough* tight wad) but buying into it, was great.  It mixed Zelda with Minecraft with a proper olde tyme Adventure feel.

I had high hopes it would become part of my regular rotation, unfortunately, development seems to have utterly stopped, and it blows in the wind like dust from my gaming bones.

Do you miss an old game?  Do you insist you have quit a game, or stopped subscribing to it?... Let us know what it is in the comments below!

Eve PVP - No-one Engages

As you all know, I'm a big fan of the style of PVP in World of Warcraft.  Not the outcome of that PVP, as I'm alliance and played on two servers where alliance couldn't fight their way out of a wet paper bag, but that you can queue up and dive into things.

In Eve however, you have to look for trouble, be surprised by trouble, or simply not get into trouble, to have PVP arrive.  I have spent about 65% of my time (over the last three hours) tempting people into trying to fight me... They see right through this and refuse, they're not dumb... But, then they're trying to chose the battlefield, and there seems little leverage to make them fight me, unless they want to...

And it seems, even -10.0 rated pirates don't want to fight me...

I had my armageddon out, I checked out a local 0.4 sec pipe and went for a jolly, first I checked there were pilots there, and indeed their were... a couple of dil-holes with "We are Angry Fuckers" style corps, and a few miner style players who were not out mining... presumably because of the first lot of 'tards.

Anyway, I loiter around, I move between several low-sec systems and no-one challenges me... I even sit slow boating, as if I'm on autopilot... No-one comes to even take a look... I know this because I could see them on my scanner, not coming to look, they were just "looking" with their scanners... which means they weren't cloaked and already looking, nor were they off changing ship to challenge me.

So, driving up and down, down and up, that's what I've done... waggling my eye lashes, and looking, for all the world like a pointless target, I even shot some belt rats with only one gun, to make me look like I was struggling... hoping to have them engage...

But, they didn't...

This has always been the way with Eve for me, either you are out trying to earn a living, not looking for trouble, and trouble appears... Or... No trouble comes your way, when you're looking.

Point of fact, I went to the system in question because I had a really good fight there once, I was returning from a mission and three guys jumped me, and I tanked and killed a couple (chasing one off) in a mission fit battlecruiser... It was a good fight, and I decided that day to park one or two PVP fits in the region... But all to no avail...

I'm beginning to wonder if I should just go join the Red Vs Blue thing and call is quits on roaming PVP in Eve... I mean, I'm no Garmon, or Kil2, but if people won't engage... What is a pilot to do?

Docking Accepted....

It has been nearly two years since I played Eve.  I quit to play Star Trek online, being very unimpressed with Star Trek and finding my then corporation in Eve becoming more and more inactive I didn't return to the game... I was a huge player of Eve, I had at one time three accounts, all with two years of training time on them, and one with a lot longer than that.

I had industry down pat, and ran an industry organized corp, I had a carrier and a POS out in low-sec, I had a fleet of battleships for running missions, and even indulged in some PVP from time to time... But the PVP in Eve always made me nervous... You actually can loose ships, and working alone I always found it hard to deal with the myriad of other fittings one found out in space.

Unlike WoW where I was a PVP diva, you just get killed, jump up and re-spawn with no harm, in Eve getting shot at, or loosing when you started shooting, was a real bummer.  But the thrill was there... It really was.

One of my accounts was a pirate, I use the past tense, because really I was coerced into a Pirate Corp as a three week old noob, what had happened was that I was out ratting, and did not know that 0.4 was like dangerous, I was a noob... So I was shooting shit in a belt when two guys jumped me... I was in a terribly fitted Amar battlecruiser, and they were in moderately okay fitted Gallente cruisers.  The fight was close, but I lost my Battlecruiser, but I chatted to them and they ended up inviting me...

The net result was three weeks of struggle, I bought a battleship, lost it, bought another, lost it, bought a set of frigates, never flew them... and the corp moved location, I moved out there, they dropped us off and then moved somewhere else, leaving me with a -0.95 rating and nowhere to make money...

I tried to repair that character reputation, but it was all to no avail, the history was indelibly there, I was a pirate... Things got worse, when I found some friends in 0.0 space, and set up working with them, then one day I got shot at by a guy far from their space... but I killed him... YAY a KILL!!... Only to get back to my friends to find out they were more friendly with him and they blew me up.

Utterly dejected I left this character, sent his ISK to an alt and set up trading a while... ending up at the start of this post with a new character, and two other accounts, running missions and mining for a living.

However, this week, I have the urge for more internet space ships... I have the urge for some pew pew... I've actually got all three accounts restored (but not subscribed) and each is offering 15 days free play time.

There are two or three new places for PVP in Eve... The empire war is still going on (this was started when I was still playing) but I found that joining a certain nation limited my trading and mining opportunities, especially when shipping a freighter around the universe.  The new avenues for combat are a little more up my street... One is called Red v Blue... 

No, not that Red v Blue... this is a player run initiative, to create to corporations in Eve, one called "Red" the other called "Blue", and the two are at perpetual war with one another... This means one is able to wage a limited war of opportunity, jumping in and out of the corporations at will, and doing it all whilst not getting overly exposed to low-sec or 0.0 ganking.

This appeals to me... It also appeals to me to carry out the last thing I had on my Eve agenda, before I quit, this was to find some empire mining operation, which was definitely linked to the low-sec or null sec big boys, and declare war on them, making it hard for them to move their goods around.  This idea of mine came about, because my mining corp was being pressured to leave the high-sec and low-sec areas it worked in.  We were being pressured even off of the exploration find we were uncovering, and it was all getting very silly... 

Working so hard in high-sec to find an exploration target, only to settle in mining and find the neighbours burrowing into your fat asteroids as well....

Unfortunately before I dive back in I need to get to grips with the vast number of changes to the game, there have been two major updates, and around five complex patches and balance changes to the game since I departed.  Everything from types of ships, to module roles, to the shape of the universe itself have been changed.

The most interesting thing I saw as an ex-mission runner was the idea of new tier-3 battlecruisers, able to fit battleship sized modules... The idea of having my main tanking (shield) ship running missions (level IV - so a battleship) backed up by a faster, more manoeuvrable, hard hitting gunship battlecruiser was very interesting.

So, this leaves me in the precarious position of wanting to look at all this, knowing what a huge time sink it is, and how little time I actually get on the computer at home...

I'm going to take out a trial account and get used to the new user interface first... and I also stumbled over this active blog, to update my knowledge of the system:

http://www.thewholefrigate.com/2012/03/what-is-pvp-fit.html

Busy Busy...

Oh me oh my, could more be going on this week?  Gaming wise, we’ve had the release date for Cataclysm… Clearly someone at the BBC News desk has a huge game boner for World of Warcraft, because they report a lot of stuff about the game on there.  I reckon they’ve also got an Eve player and a fair few Console players… get in touch chaps & chapesses, I’d love to hear what you play at the BBC?

But yes, Cataclysm, 7^th December, if you all missed it, just in time to get the bugs sorted for Christmas, or more specifically for the University holidays… yes here in Britain the Universities full of Students start to break up and most have completed the break up for the Yule period by the 15^th… so I guess most all Student UK customers of Blizzard will be busy busy busy enjoying the new game.

I still fear for the inflation of items in the game, I’ve also noted that the retail price is listed as €34.99, that’s about £30.  That’s the price of a whole new game… I don’t doubt Blizzards work is worth the cost, but thirty quid… when you already pay a subscription?... Nooo thank you.

I have to admit, I’ve had a few pangs to go back to WoW recently, notably last weekend, when I thought long and hard about trying to introduce the misses to it with me… it’d only end in tears though, and she’s got better things to do with her time… As have I… *cough*.

Eve-Online

Alas other gaming news, I’ve had to let my Eve Subs slide for a few months, I might pick them back up after Christmas, but I simply wasn’t playing enough to warrant all three subs.

Grand Theft Auto… WHERE?

The other gaming news I wanted to bring to the fore, since Darren took my link about Wii elbow J, was a report of Take Two Interactive (aka Rockstar Games) winning damages in the High Court… yes the law came down on their side; and rightly so; after Express Newspapers (a tatty rag of a newspaper here in the UK) said they would make a new game… “Grand Theft Auto Rothbury”.

This fictional title was so named for the town in which the now infamous gunman Raoul Moat had his final stand off with Police, the full story is here.

I’m not too bothered about Rockstar winning the case, I just find the “joke” from the newspaper; which kicked off the case; as in such bad taste it’s like I’m sucking on a pocket full of old pennies.  Bitter Bitter Bitter.

Obituaries

And finally, sadly, we’ve lost two shining lights in Entertainment and Film this week, first in the US Tony Curtis.  I liked Curtis in his films, my favourite being Operation Petticoat where he starred opposite Cary Grant.  I don’t know why I really like that film. I just do, and I enjoy Curtis’s character within.

But a bigger loss for me is that of Sir Norman Wisdom.  Who died yesterday evening.  Many of you in the US won’t have a clue who Norman was, you’ll not have heard of him, not have seen his films.  You may see one on BBC feeds soon, as a tribute to our Norman.  You may not understand the films, you may not get the social context, you may not know the jokes, just watch the utter brilliance, the sheer delight that is Norman’s legacy to us.  His body acting, his comic timing, his slap stick style.  He was described by Charlie Chaplin as “my favourite clown”, go on, go find out why.

Sir Norman Wisdom, OBE (1915 - 2010)

Eve-Online on VMPlayer with Kubuntu Linux

Right, so I've been busy, sorry about that, but I have tonight at least found myself a fair hunk of time to geek out a little more over VMplayer. And I'm impressed with the results.

As I made mention in a previous post I've been toying with Virtualizing some of my machines at home, firstly to unlock the masses of memory and cores I own, this has come off of the back of some work I've carried out at work to start to virtualize the software development.

Not to mention to finally get my development environment at home off of Windoze, but still retain the ability to test my output on a real windows box. Anyway, I'm mumbling, tonight I've been over a fair few places on the internet working out how to optimize a Windows XP Pro guest OS

on a Kubuntu Linux host.

And this is the result....

That's right... I got eve running at 1024x768x24 full screen, but in the virtual machine, so it's a window... this really makes my geekometer max out.

I'm not going to bore you with the details of what I did, you can message me and find out... but for the basics...

• Install Kubuntu - Spend a little time optimizing the desktop, turning off all desktop effects is a good step.
• Install the best Native Graphics drivers for your machine into Linux. ATi users will be at a loss here, sorry.
• Install VMplayer - Download and install VMplayer.
• Now, go find your Windows XP Pro install disc, create a virtual machine in VMplayer, you need to give it 1GB of RAM and at least a single core, turning off the sound card really helps here btw and give it about 40GB of hard drive space... remove the floppy drive and set the display to 1 display with a maximum resolution of 1024x768, let Windows do it's thing and install [you will need a real licensed copy of Windows by the way].
• Let the Virtual machine boot up, optimize windows so it's desktop effects are pretty much off.
• Also let the VMware Tools download and install into the Virtual Machine.
• Ensure that you have 3D Acceleration turned on in the Virtual Machine Settings, and also make sure that the Virtual Machine supports the 3D acceleration properly.
• Next, inside the XP Virtual Machine browse on the internet to get yourself the DirectX Runtime 9.0c - Older ones tend to give the best results, I'm using a runtime from approximately August 2005.
• Now we're off the beaten track, shutdown your Virtual Machine, and browse your hard drive to its VMX file, this is the file with all its settings inside. Add this to the last like "svga.ramSize=X", without the quotes.
• The value of X is the number of bytes, and I've found it best to give the virtual machine half of your graphics RAM, so my test card has 256MB of RAM, so I've assigned the virtual machine 128MB (i.e. svga.vramSize=134217728 ).
• Now, this is the real boring bit, start up and download Eve-Online within your Virtual Machine (see below).
• Once Eve is Installed, let it open (it'll open on Maximum settings, for some reason).
• Don't press anything, it'll take ages to start up, then set the settings within Eve to be the minimum values possible.
• Voila, it'll run, as my screen shot shows.

The real key is to experiment, accept that you're going to run this at lower than your usual settings.

Certainly, for mining and trading this is working fine for me, I'm not sure about Missions, but I'll give them ago. But don't expect to be ace on the old PVP circuit with this set up, since action needs a good reaction you need native performance.

New Toy

Oh, and one of my alts I just set up a new ship for some PVP fun... Don't you just love how cool Amarr ships look...

The Colonists Are Doing Their Thing...

Well, today is the fourth of July, a day that a bunch of trouble makers signed a piece of paper declaring them independant or something... I still say John Hancock's signature says more about American personality today than it ever said as his actual name... but anyway...

Today, I've noticed has been a mixed day for MMORPG participation, the numbers of Americans one runs into in Eve for example has been markedly lessened. Whether that's a good thing or not, I'm uncertain, there's a core of pretty decent yanks out there flying about.
But, this is not the point of my post, today I've been working a little more on my planetary installations in Eve... and I've come one conclusion... Darren (of Common Sense Gamer) please, please, for the love of god almighty, please don't ever install any planetary gear in Eve.


Okay... Don't come crying to me when you try it and find out that its CCP's covert implementation of Farmville...

Yes, I'm affraid, I've come to the conclusion that appart from being able to make a product you can use or sell in New Eden, there is quite a lot of the same game mechanics as Farmville.

I find I've a set of extractors which are on long cycles, and a set which are on very short cycles, and these short cycled ones run out of materials to extract after just a few hours so I'm constantly going back to find more materials for them...

It's not a dead dog of a process yet, I'm still doing the tweaking to try and find a mix of extractors to optimize my cycles. I have intermediate silos to collect excess resources from the extractors, and provide it for the next industrial cycle.

But at the end of the day, this is just a lot of clicking every few hours... And, I don't think its all that much fun.

Planetary Interaction in Eve

They say a picture speaks a thousand words, well, the above image speaks of at least half a dozen... Interesting, Awkward, New, at-long-last... at the ones I'll pick out just now. I am of course talking about CCP's newly introduced planetary interaction in their venerable title Eve-Online.

As ever, with a something in Eve you have to train up some skills to carry out this task, they primarily involve skills to scan for resources on the planets, installing better command centers and linking planets together so they can cooperate in production tasks.

Now, I think it always important in Eve that whatever you are doing it have a purpose, the purpose of my Planetary production is to provide me with a large stash of POS fuels. Well, at least the stocks of POS fuels I used to have to buy off of the market. This is a major step in completing the supply chain cycles for POS, it at least explains where these fuels come from in the World that is New Eden.


It may not be very clear, but here is my first lot of processed Oxygen, from a Gas planet installation.

There are varying levels of possible materials which can be produced from your installations, many of which I don't have a clear explanation or understanding of. But, time will tell on that, I'll figure it out.

About the planetary interaction interface, I have to say it is unfortunately very awkward to work with, between constant messages telling me to wait x amount of seconds between actions, and the "routing" explanation is pretty poor. I managed at one point to route raw materials straight through the factory to the silo... with no explanation that the materials would not be processed on the way through.

It's very hard to explain why the interface is so awkward, it is just something you would have to experience yourself.

Awkwardness aside though, the interface is very pretty, and once set up, you can safely dock and managed your installations from afar. You only need visit them to pick up, or deliver, materials and goods.

This fire and forget approach to the planets, as well as the gorgeous (though sparse) graphics make for an enjoyable new feature, and as I emphasised above, it has a purpose. In fact I think it will have a major on going effect on the universe at large.

For now, I'm signing off, it's the daily down time and I need breakfast.

GF..... GG.... Nice One....

Well, I was just minding my own business, floating around popping some drone rats in a mission... (don't worry, I'm not that much of a pussy, the mission was in 0.2 sec).

Anyway, I'm just floating over to the last phase and a neutral comes into local... I don't like this, but this person has +4.0 security rating, and their bio and corp indicates they're a miner... But I take no precautions, I align for the planet closest my direction of travel, and I get out the ship scanner.

365 degrees, max range... scan scan scan.... Nothing... two minutes, three minutes... no probes, no sign, but they've not left local... I got wrecks everywhere... they're going to be scanned down...

Do I leave, and possibly have them scan them down to lay an ambush for me later, or do I stay and see what they drop on me?

Feck it, it's a battlecruiser, I got shed loads of them...

I stick around... Watching local....

Bing bing bing... three more into local....

Okay, all the same corp, they've clearly scanned me down. I wait, thank god all the rats are dead... my shield is refilling happily (I'm an armour tank though)... I have no ECM drones, just five lights and I have no ECCM... so if they jam me, I'm up shit creek.

Anyway, they're coming, I'm ready... and voila, here they are, one destroyer, two battlecruisers... the fourth, their scout, is still laying low. Anyway, I lock them and am happy to vaporize their destroyer in two hits of my Medium Beam laser II's.... I think he's a bit surprised too as I just see "Shit" typed in local.

But, now the two battlecruisers have me locked up, they're sending out ECM drones, but they're 45km away. I lock up all ten drones coming my way, and I set my drones on them and start to lock their ships up.

My shields are back down, but I'm concentrating on their left most ship, my drones have eaten through theirs and it looks like they're not launching any more. I have eaten into this target's shield and my first few perfect range salvo's are starting to bite into his armour.... so clearly this guy's not got Tactical Shield Manipulation up very high... but I have a feeling he's shield tanking, by the effects I can see around his ship when I put the camera on him... my armour is getting eaten into now though.

Suddenly their fourth man, the scout uncloaks above me, he's in a Falcon, and he starts to stick an ECM Jam cycle on me. But, with my sensor booster, it doesn't hit. So I lock him up, and cut my guns, leaving my drones on the guy far out... as I reset my camera though, happily he detonates and I see a lot of Russian looking text in local...

So, as I'm waiting to lock the falcon, sit-rep on my ship... I'm at about 70% armour, I'm getting hit with explosive missiles and autocannon fire from the enemy, and there's a falcon above me trying to jam me and firing the odd thunderbolt EM missile my way... I am not happy, I'm webbed, scrambled and still outnumbered... I'm also having heart palpitations with the adrenaline rush...

Anyway, I suddenly hit my groups of guns and missile launcher as one, and set my drones after the Falcon, amazingly I take it to half shields with a massive alpha strike of 2200 damage and then I take off whatever he was shield boosting that cycle with my missile. My drones arrive on him, and as my lasers chew into him I see him turning to warp off. I have no scrambler, so I'm going to let him go, but then just as his shields fail and my guns are ripping into him... his ECM jams me... I loose all targets.

One, two, three cycles this hits me for... my armour is down to 20%, my cap is up to 75% though, with just running my Damage Control II and Medium Armour Repper II... it's had time to catch its breath.

Anyway, suddenly my lock starts on the falcon again, and I press all my weapons again, the moment it locks it gives him all the lasers and fires off a missile... and he explodes in a coruscating cloud of pretty pretty pixels. My lock lands on the final battlecruiser, he's 4K from me, but pretty undamaged... can my tank make it?

He thinks it can't and he's bearing down on me now, I'm pulling 25m/sec speed with this guy, I zip my drones over and I switch to my shortest range tech II crystals (I had been using tech I gamma's to this point, I didn't get a chance to swap out, and forgot while I was jammed... I was busy screaming at the "bastard ECM whore").

Anyway, my lasers are going at him, this one looks like he's an armour tank too, so I take his shield off quick, but he's at 1K from me now, jiggling me...he still has me scrambled, so I can't go anywhere. But it seems he's made a fatal, over eager, mistake...he's gotten so close and it using longer range ammo, he's still hitting me, but he's not taking chunks of me.

His three friends, in their pods, leave the system... This guy is going to try to hold me, or kill me, by the time they get back in whatever they can get themselves back into in the next 3 minutes. I'm loosing this fight, I get a couple of unfavourable low damage hits in, and he's eating into my hull.

He starts to laugh, he actually types into local "Ransom 25mill".

He's trying to ransom me... I just cost them a Thrasher, a Cyclone and a Falcon. I'm only flying a fat pigeon... Sorry, I mean a Prophecy. And he wants 25 mill... LOL!

I'm into this for the giggle now, I see he's turning to warp out... my ship is spewing fire and smoke out the back... So I play him... I pull in my drones, cut firing and say "okay".... and he stops firing!!!

I get a cycle of repair into my armour... and I start to move towards him... I need to work fast to keep him interested, so I throw him 25 isk, then type "Sorry, missed naughts"... the nubwit actually replies "s'kay, happens". I've not dropped my lock, and I'm crawling at 25m/sec towards him. And suddenly I bump him... he was aligning to warp out.... his ship must be in a bad way. My cap is good, my armour repper now has two cycles in... and I hit the "Overheat Wrack" on my guns, and let them loose, my drones are out and on him, he's bumped off alignment, unable to warp out, he just manages to type "no" into local and BOOOM!

He's dead, he's actually so pissed off, or got such a bad PC/connection that I get to lock his pod and pop it... I have his corps now.... I lost about 45% of my armour though, hence the fire in the image above.

HUAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I love PVP like this in Eve, I was so sure I was dead, but it turned out they were useless noobs. Or overconfident drunks.

After looting their ships, I had a bunch of tech II armour hardeners, a bunch of guns, ammo and cap booster chargers... the covert ops cloak on the falcon popped though... that would have been nice.

I received a PM from the last guy in the fight "GF". Is all it said.

Eve, Eve and more Eve

All this week, I've been bitting and bobbing in Eve. I've moved a few ships around, I scared the hell out of two Russian noobs in low-sec by uncloaking my falcon on top of them (they were being lary about my not being able to find them, when they had opened a Militia mission, which has a system wide beacon).


One thing that has always struck, and will probably always strike, me is the quality of the look and feel of Eve. I mean, the new Tranquility Engine is spankingly beautiful, even when docked (as you can see with one of my Amarrian Assault Ships above).

I mean, I started playing in 2005, and the engine back then looked light years a-head of anything else around it [no pun intended]... I've seen the highs and the lows of life on the edge, I've been a pirate and I've spend a fair amount of time in Empire making myself fat and rich.

I'm doing well though, I usually end up falling into a stupor of mining asteroids, something I find very relaxing, but totally mind numbing... sometimes you want mind numbing, sometimes you want raw materials, but other times you want a thrill.

So, I've been preparing to re-join my militia's. I have a fleet (and I mean a fleet) of tech 1 cruisers, battlecruisers and battleships sat in a certain location, I have a POS Tower sat ready for deployment as a strong point, and I have a carrier for support while I plan my secret attack behind the enemy lines...


I have also though been developing a rather healthy interest in trade, something; as I've said before; I never took an interest in before.

My running tally to far is 108 million ISk from a 1 million ISK investment, in three weeks.

Sometimes markets are tough, and I'm getting tired of having to perform WoW style 0.01 ISK undercuts, on other orders out there.

What I'm going to be looking at next weekend (since I've just finished the planetary interaction skills to level 4) is ... yes planetary interaction, I kind of gave it away then didn't I... anyway, yes. Planetary interaction. I watched the CCP Tutorials, and as a graduate of the Eve-University I've enjoyed watching their video guides on YouTube... they're not overly detailed... I remember how detailed my Eve-Video's were for the University.

My Videos: I, II, III

Tyrannis

Yes, the new expansion from CCP for Eve-Online has just launched today! Get it while it's hot.
The patch is a generous 291 MB in size, on average here in the UK you should be getting about 700k/sec download (no matter what your bandwidth/speed is) with highs around 2mb/sec.

Update

The patch process seems to be flawed, as it completes I receive the message:


I'm currently running the client repair tool to see what's wrong, and it just says that a file "math.dll" in the temp folder it's working with is a piece of Malware...

This is PrevX reporting it as Malware and the install stops...


Update Again

The repair tool has been busy... it reports that the install was missing a bunch of data nearly 52mb of it...?


As for the Malware report, I've cleaned the whole temp directory listed as bad from my machine, and a new bunch of temp directories were created. None of these have a Math.dll in them...?

So I can only think that was already on my machine? God I hate Windoze.

EVE Expansion, Social Clicking and more DDO

It might actually be time for a me to return to Eve-Online, with ever more news being released about the next Expansion due out in May, May the 18th to be precise, my appetite has been whetted.

EVE Online | Tyrannis

Unfortunately, I sense some foreboding about the new features. Planetary Interaction, or PI as it's being called, looks awesome and it very well might be, however, I have a feeling it'll be the exclusive domain of 0.0 alliances, and out of the reach of anti-social high-sec miner spunk monkeys, like me.

I did however like the look of the new Scorpion. Having flown a Scorp in fleet engagements, I know how quickly they get made primary [everyones hates ECM], but I also know how ugly they are/were. So, I have a semi-stoked game boner for that little gem...

I have tonight however been doing three things... the first was play some "Social City" on Facebook and when I use the word play I do so in the loosest sense of the word, you know like you'd play with peeling paint... or... you'd be made to play with the kid from class who got the Chicken Pox first.

Here we see the burgeoning "Xel City" at level 3... a lot of clicks later... and you end up with this...

Erm..... Thrilling....

The next thing I did however, was more interesting, I played some more DDO. I made myself another Rank of level 1, and played a little more of the initial story line. This time stopping occultist baddy people hitting a crystal. For my efforts I got a nice pair of new bracers.


I have to say that I am over my initial downer about DDO, I'm coming to grip with the interface, after three good play sessions of about 2 hours each it is comming more naturally, however, I still have this nagging feeling that really it shouldn't have been up to me to change my needs from the game. It does seem to lack some basic information, access to quite what to do doesn't come easily. And I'd have to say some of that problem comes from information overload. There are a lot of NPC's, a lot of interactions to get used to and the tooltips lag terribly [even on an overclocked Quad Core CPU on 8GB of RAM with dual 8800 Graphics cards in SLi Mode????].

I did however come across some rather lush graphics, the lighting in DDO is done very well... the shadow stenciling however, is not... more about that in an up coming post.

The other thing I did was re-watch the Top Gear USA Special, there's something so heart warming watching a BBC crew being run out of "a hick town" in a hail of stones.