That Moment...

You know that moment when you see this...

And the mage rolls need....

Yeah, that's the kind of day I've had.

More World of Warcraft topics to follow...

Pathfinder

There's not a log going on, save to say I've been reading and following the Pathfinder RPG game rules.  Which are essentially D&D v3.5 rules. Message ends.

Confession Time - D&D

I've got a confession for you all... I have never played Dungeons & Dragons... There, I've said it, I hope we can move on after this.

Now I'm not including the online incarnation of the game, which I've played, and also blogged about...

I'm talking about the actual pen & paper, around a table, D&D...

I'm not sure where or why this passed me by, it is exactly my thing, but I think my trouble is I don't want to be a player, I think I want to try my hand at being the Games Master.

I dunno, I wonder if you can D&D via skype?... Anyone want to try?

Multiboxing - Healers - World of Warcraft

No, I've not been idle, the Multiboxer has had a lot of work on the local multi-client version.  Its had auto log on ability, and selective delivery (so you can stop certain clients getting the key clicks by filter) plus there's also a new master over ride, so you can hold a key to send all following keys the same to all clients...

This last item is great, because it lets you react better in PVP situations, you can hold the button if jumped, and TAB - to pick the target - and voila, nail them with everything, no need for worrying about the mappings... This is particularly good when all your running clients are the same, e.g. all Warlocks, or all mages.

Of course you can run the whole program with no filters at all, so its all 1-to-1 mappings, this lets you run the multiboxer very easiler in 5 man PVP groups, for battlegrounds!

 

One other thing I've put a bit of time into over the last few days is leveling up a free to play (Starter) wow account with a healer for the other group you've seen running.  The plan being to go take on some higher level elites somewhere - since we're still free accounts we can't party to go down an instance - so elites is our only option to show off...

 

In other MMO news, Allods online has quit being supported & operated by gPotato, it has been passed back to the Russian developers... You can migrate your account from gPotato back to them...

Now, Allods was one of those games I was short listing to add to the free to play list, however, I've been trying to download the client for a few days and been failing, it is dismally slow.

MMORPG Multiboxer (World of Warcraft, Runes of Magic, LOTRO) #3

A fresh development update, the launching of the more complex (than WoW) clients is now working and input is going to multiple local clients in Runes of Magic, here's my level 1 mages backing up a new level 1 Knight.  I'd never played Knight in Runes before, so this is going to be interesting, I plan to have one knight, two mages for DPS and then two priests of healing.  To nuke through the content.

The challenge will be when I come to run multiple clients, Runes of Magic seems to take about 1GB (at least while loading) per client.  Lowering the settings on the slave clients is working well however.

I am of course still looking for Donations to help pay to continue this project more actively, I'm specifically looking for WoW sponsors now as I think I need to cough up for 5 accounts, and that's going to go down with the wife like a tonne of bricks.

I will however take a saunter over to LOTRO, just as soon as I've cloned the install to my many virtual machines to multi-head testing and then cloned it to my laptop for network testing.

I'm also adding ipv6 support to the networking!

 

You can donate directly to this project and help fund development today, any donators will receive goodies, I'm not sure what you'll get yet, but it will be software related!  Or perhaps in game items to help you in your favourite games (e.g. Diamonds in Runes of Magic).

All donators receive a discount on the final product.

Any donator posting £10 or more will receive access to the software to help with the closed Beta test.

Any donator posting £100 or more can join what I'm terming the "premium" club, and have exclusive access to the development process - bug tracking, Alpha & Beta access.

Any donator posting £200 or more can come and have dinner with me and discuss direct requirements they might have for the software, or just shoot the shit about gaming and blogging in general (You have to travel to approximately the UK M1 Junction 25).

Todays video is some more, freshly taken, video of WoW.  The reason we have video of WoW and not the Rom Session above is that Rom takes so much ram it crawled - the development VM is only 32bit, so only has access to 3.5gb of ram... Wow runs much better, seems to be much more optimised.  And of course you can run WoW in DirectX9 mode to save yet more resources.

Minecraft Ordeal 3

I've been back in my Minecraft world, and I'm a little disappointed by a couple of things, first of all, that lava pool, I've breached it above and below with glass, it's even bigger than I previously thought, it goes under other rock in a circle now over 100 squares around.

This is a major problem, you can see my lower mining hall below, were I've propped the lava pool up on glass, and you can now see above where I've made a passage directly through for my higher mining shafts, but it is a lot of dangerous work, I was at one point down to 1 heart and burning before I had my water out to quench myself.

And that only then resulted in more damn problems...

Then the temple... What a let down... There was basically just a shaft down the middle, and TNT below a pressure plate... No adventure there at all, not what I expected.  I dunno, I expected something like CubeWorld, I assumed CubeWorld had copied Minecraft, but now it seems not.

Here's my expedition and you can see I expose the trap after digging down parallel with the shaft, in the chests was gold, bones, iron and one saddle as well as a lot of rotten flesh.

I had all the sandstone I could away with me, filling my inventory... But still no adventure, no fulfillment.

CubeWorld lacks any depth, Minecraft lacks any adventure... I don't know what to do... I'm tempted to sub to Eve to make sure my name gets on the statue... And I'm even tempted to download WoW again.

I would love to have the time to sit down and write my own new game, a mix of D&D with Lort of Ultima, with I dunno, something else... But I really don't have the time when I'm in a programming mood... Work is taking over, I worked a 6 day week, where I should have done 37 hours I've done 54; and the project is still not done.

I need something I can put on and zone out with...

So Wow is the perfect place for me, I find other games, like D&D online, LOTRO and the like to look terrible... I like the cartoony world of WoW... It's just not the same as the old days... And I've been out of it for 2 years... and really for the amount of time I'll get to play it, would £9 a month be worth it?... I doubt it.

But, take a look at my Battle.NET account and it says there's "Wow Starter", which is free to play?

It's a whole other account?

Diablo III Release and Back Lash

El Diablo is out there in its third incarnation, some of you may have worked that out when I was spouting off about why I cancelled my order for it the other week.

I mulled my decision, I took a number of mails from readers telling me how much of a fool I've been, and I even had a close friend complain that I was abandoning him by not buying the game...

But... The game is out now... and it seems my thoughts on the topic were pretty much right...

Firstly, the game, despite the experience Blizzard have with player numbers from their MMO behemoth World of Warcraft, as suffered server problems - as I wanted to play the game offline and alone server issues were high on my 'watch for' list, and they've been reported in bucket fills.  In fact server problems have been so widly reported that they made main stream media, notably appearing on El Reg and the BBC sites.

Secondly, it does seem; listening to friends and contacts playing; that the game is not living up to the hype...

Its been over a decade in coming, it can never live up to the hype... but... it seems in some places the opinion is that the game is pretty low on replay value, and its pretty linear in other places - where its predecessor, though repetative - due to the technology used to generate the lands being random by limited by art palette - was not so linear.

Here's some of the choice points put to me:

"it feels like a dumbed down version of d2 (Diablo 2), it doesn't have the same dark feel"

This is not a suprise to me, how can a game from family playing Wow hugging Blizzard ever release a game truely horrifying?

"the music just isn't spooky and the cut scenes frankly rather than being epic-movie-like things they were in d2, just feel like cartoon scripts written for 10 year olds"

I'm not checking on the demographics of the players of the game, but I'm sure Blizzard want as many people as possible, and they want as little back lash as possible.  With a major playing base coming from the continential United States they're not going to be able to press the demon side of the game, even though its name is Spanish for "Devil" they can't press that... The game has to pander to the lowest common denominator, and that denominator is 10 year old yanks...

Then there was my worries about the controls of the game, I feared nothing but a click fest, an RSI law suit waiting to happen... Here's what my friend had to say...

"[the] first 10 levels you only really get three spells and it gets quite boring"

"i played on an asian server for half an hour with a wizard but got very bored very quickly then switched to a witch doctor when i got on the eu server.  I levelled him to 9, defeated a boss and suddenly the game gets a lot harder"

Hmmmm?

"i felt like I played for 2 hours felt like i had more fun when i played monk for two hours in the beta version the other week"

And this is a recurring theme, I have two other contacts telling me they had more fun from the Beta, that they feel that the beta contained a short, sharp linear example of the game, which is much better than the game itself.

At the end of the day, after having my pre-order for a year I was really not bothered whether the game was delivered or not, I was never into Blizzards other IP (Starcraft) and I quit WoW cold turkey, so maybe its good I'm not into this game, and not hearing good things... Not least when I also hear this...

"I'm sure it'll improve once I gain a couple of levels, maybe something will happen at level 10... I'm not hankering to get back to the game"

There are lots of hopes that Act II has more substance to it, there are hopes that the game evolves some... But whilst keeping the base players happy?... The Kids happy?... Their Moms happy?... It's never going to manage it.

And if this is the level of feedback I'm getting, this just re-enforces my decision to have not bought it.

Grab the Dragon by the Horns

Well, I have to take a slice of Humble pie... I'm only going to put the pie onto my plate, I'm not actually going to eat it yet... the reason is, that after playing a good solid couple of hours of Dungeons and Dragons Online, I actually got something accomplished. And it didn't drive me insane doing it.

In short order, I finished a couple of instances, I made rank 2 of level 1, I got to grips with the interface and I played about with the graphics options.

First off, let me explain something which I think has an important bearing on where my opinion of DDO spawns; I've never played Dungeons and Dragons... I know, you're all gasping in horror and closing your Internet browser's of choice without a second glance... but, having never played Dungeons and Dragons as a table top game I only had a rudimentary idea of what to expect from the intellectual property of the online game. Unfortunately I have played other online multi-player role playing games, notably WoW.

So I have to take my cap in my hands and admit that I have come towards trying DDO from a WoW perspective, and let me tell you lovely folks out there... 'Coming at DDO from a WoW point of view is unfair, semi-unjust and may make you miss out on a title you enjoy'.

Having said that, I must make myself clear on one point, that I don't think it is unfair to come to any contemporary MMO offering and no expect to apply WoW metrics to evaluating it. Blizzard did so many things right to popularise the genre it's probably unfair on players to move the goal posts too far; whether this is stifling innovation in the development of new MMO's or just making titles older than WoW seem awkward I think is for a whole other post.

But, as unfair as it is to the makers of offerings other than WoW in the genre we have to admit that unlike any other title Blizzard have hit the spot and defined “the norm”. And not taking a pinch of Blizzard's “ways of working” is awkward to new players whom have only ever played wow. [Which sadly now-a-days is going to be the vast amount of PC based MMO players].

Anyway, onwards and upwards, I was pleasantly surprised, oh yes I was. I got into my first instance, I chose to play this on “normal”. When you begin instances in DDO you can choose to play them in one of five escalating levels of difficulty. From Solo, through to raid. I assume at this point that the levels of difficulty reflect the level of reward which will be made available at the end.

So, for my first instance I chose Normal, and in I went. I had to fight past the obligatory little mobs and I found a little puzzle of pulling levers to access new areas, all very fine, I was however quite interested in the proper puzzle room at the end of the instance, the idea of this was that you worked out how to get power from one central stone to those at each corner by moving the tiles on the ground to align them and allow the power to flow out from the centre. And I have to say, I really enjoyed this little mechanic, the first time I'd seen such a thing in an MMO [I think, certainly the first time I remembered it] and I got to work out the puzzle and feel like I'd achieved something.

The puzzle wasn't even the end of the instance, but it was fun. Something that other MMO's miss in spades is fun, WoW aims for grind to make you keep wanting to play, Runes of Magic aims for play time and breadth of experience to keep you wanting to play and other MMO's have other mechanisms for keeping you there in your seat. DDO however did it to me this evening by at least giving me something to work out...

Not that the experience was perfect, far from it, but I enjoyed this little aside.

One problem I came across was the lighting effects, if you are in a room with two lamps on a wall say, you will get yourself a nicely cast shadow from the closest lamp, if you them move towards the other lamp, suddenly as a mid point as you cross from being closer to one from the other, your shadow will suddenly flip [that's the best description for it] from the direction of the first lamp, to the new now closer one. It is a little jarring to the eye.

Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware of the difficulty of decent stencil masking to make shadows work out, but in this case, I'd have rather had no shadow than a broken shadow.

That said the shadow stencil is quite good, reflecting well what your character is doing, it is just rather poor at deciding when to switch from one light source to the next, and there is only one shadow, where as between two light sources in the real world you'd expect to have two shadows... go look yourself outside between to lamps you'll see what I mean :)

But, tonight, was all-in-all, a decent experience, and I can't wait to have some more.

Welcome to Eberron

Right well, here we are at my second instalment of my progress with DDO. Downloading and installing the game, in both standard and high quality graphics, is actually relatively painless, indeed it took far less time and was more informative to the progress made than other titles and indeed the obligatory patching and data updating following install went on without a hitch on both platforms I tried.

The only glitch came with I starved the connected of bandwidth, throttling it down to below 100kpbs, I found the updates repeatedly stalled while downloading. But I can forgive their servers that, after all I caused the problem by watching too many Videos of Elmo on YouTube.

Once I logged in, I could select the world [I assume this is the same as realm] to visit, and previously visited realms are highlighted in bold. However, if like me you are on different machines between visits the different machines are not aware of what realms you've been on. As such I missed getting the same character twice for my time on the laptop and desktop PC's.

Creation of the characters went on without a hitch, however, when creating your character you get a few of the action animations being played. Immediately I was struck with how awkward some of these animations look. Characters will spin and swing clubs, dodge, parry and cast... but some of the moments are physical impossibilities. I don't like this much, it's a real turn off to me, I like to see natural looking [albeit cartoon-esp] movements. Not these strange efforts in DDO. Indeed I'd have to go so far to say they look amateurish.

However, after selecting my class, race, sub abilities and look I was ready to go, and after giving my character both a fore and surname, I was on a beach somewhere with a short bloke shouting at me.

Please Note - I added the speech bubble.

Now, this guy grates with me, his speech is voice acted by someone I want to punch, this whiny, adenoid dominated rat faced character is matched only by the most whiny adenoid dominated rat arsed voice acting. [Did I mention that the speech text is not bubbled and comes up in the most basic courier font?]

This is your welcome to DDO, this guy SHOUTING at you, showing how bad the 3D sound system is, because though you see the guy a head and slightly left of you the sound of his voice comes from way left and is VERY loud for someone stood so far away.

He proceeds to cajole you into moving about controls, however, there is a lot going on within the UI, if this is your first view of it then it can be quite daunting. You have an action bar at the bottom, which on default settings is hard to comprehend. You have a text/chat area with more of the bad font being used. You also have a mini-map but also a lot of crowding going on, the interface is not clean looking. It just looks to me like it has a lot of things to explain to me, or rather a lot of buttons I don't yet know about. And I'm not sure what clicking them is going to do. All of which leads to feeling that I'm in a rather cluttered user experience. And, with bars above others, and the position of things I have to just hope that I can change things around because to my untrained, but WoW Conditioned eye the interface in DDO does not appear to take ergonomics into account.

Now I suppose I have to draw on a point raised by Darren Love in the latest edition of SUWT. That is that with Blizzard's domination of the MMO Market with Warcraft, there are certain demands and requirements from a player of an MMO today, which are wants and needs influenced by Blizzard. One of these is a simple accessible learning curve and interface. And I'm afraid to say that though DDO's interface is visible, I don't feel like it is accessible.

Even simple things like popping up hints & tips, or tooltips seem sluggish. On the machines I'm running DDO on, I don't think it should feel sluggish... And these feelings about the UI don't even take into account actually achieving control of my character. I am solely commenting about the UI here. Actually taking control of your avatar feels even more alien.

For example, in World of Warcraft to attack you have to select the target and choose to attack [or you can auto attack with a different control]. In DDO you can stand and suddenly make your character punch air. I have been told that later this all makes sense, but right now to the total beginner it does not, I'm basically looking at an avatar whom is punching thin air and I can't seem to stop them doing it [again because in WOW you have to click something else to stop the auto-attack going on, not so in DDO].

I find this shift in my expectations hard to reconcile. I'm afraid to admit that Blizzard have me well trained, conditioned to jump to their tune... I am Pavlov's Dog for MMO control expectations. *Sobs*

However, I did play a little more of the game, I played through the introduction instance, more about that in my next DDO post.

Now, in other news, I have to blush somewhat. As you may gather from post number 1, Darren Love over at CommonSenseGamer was the inspiration for this blog, and today he has made mention of this my corner of the interwebs as his blog of the week.... I thank you Sir.

For now though, I'm about to take a weeks break from work, I'm going on Holiday! While I'm away I'm going to play some Total War Games... Those of you whom know me as “Lord Xelous” formerly of "The Lords Modding Collective" and “The Lordz Games Studio” will know how, and why, I love the Total War series.

DDO First Impressions

Oh for crying out loud, will I ever find an MMO I don't complain about? Probably not [throws rattle out of his pram], but that's not my fault games are just so bad.

And I think, DDO is going to be that way, I played the first little bit last night... and I wasn't impressed, first of all there are graphical glitches, like I set it to be 1280x1024 full screen mode, and all that did was cram the game into 1280x1024 pixels in the top left of my main screen as a window... So, not a good start there.

In the game itself the colour palette looked a little washed out, like everything was dusty, I'm not sure what was causing that appearance, but I'll persist in finding out.

Then, there's the game play itself... Okay, so I was level 1, I had the standard crappy starting mace in my hand and I was playing clueless. Ironically I immediately had to stop myself trying to use things in the "wow" style. You have to left click on things for activation and right click on things for passive selection in DDO, this is the opposite to WoW and Runes of Magic, and well, opposite to every other MMO I've played. I'm not sure if Turbine were just aiming to be different that the rest of the pack of MMO's out there, but the mechanic annoyed me greatly.

Then, the character animation and movement struck me, they were awkward, there are options to smooth the animation going on, so I'll have a play about with them tonight, but the actual movement was odd. Characters, NPC's especially, didn't seem to walk or run around, they seemed to glide while moving their legs. A most disconcerting effect. And very 1990.

Not something you'd expect in a game boasting "This Machine can run me in DirectX10, do you want me to?"... and you click Yes to be given appreciably nothing different... I'm going to run it in DirectX9 mode thoroughly for comparison...

Finally, the combat system, yes I was in a melee just swinging my beginner mace around wildly, but the text used to indicate damage, yes it floats off of things, but it's in the Courier Font... it looks like the system default... it was really off putting.

NPC speech was also presented like this, floating without a bubble, just loose text above their heads, it was hard to follow where the text began at times, and where it ended.

Overall, so far I'd day the game's pants, but I'll persist... I'm yet to interact with anyone else... well except one person called "Rox Rox" who simply ran up to everyone spawning in the first town and said "paladin" to them... "paladin".... "paladin"....

Dragon Age... A bloody mess

I didn't enjoy Dragon Age Origins.... “oh why xel, why could this be so?” I hear you all crying... well because it was [maybe still is] a crashy bugging pile of poo. Let me give you a quick specification break down of my PC.

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 – 2.6Ghz (over clocked to 3.2ghz) on water cooling single block & radiator. 4GB Corsair Dominator RAM (in 4 x 1GB sets) with aluminium cooling fins & fan. Dual nVidia 8800 GTX in SLi mode on air cooling. All in a lovely Coolmaster 1000 case. Running Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit and later Windows 7 Professional 64bit.

And Dragon age crashed all over the place for me, I clearly met the minimum specification and then some, so after buying the game and receiving it on the day of release I was very excited to install it and got my wife to be to leave me alone for the evening (no mean feat) and I got to play. I enjoyed the game LOADS.

But, then it crashed... Oh well, sometimes things do this, reboot... Crashed... What the? Reboot, twiddle with the settings to make sure nothing nasty is going on in the defaults.... CRASH. Every time I loaded my save game it simply dropped out from under me, dumping be to desktop. So I had it load a different saved game. All fine... carry on... past where I was before... CRASH.

What the heck is going on? Now I'm a programmer, so I had a few debugging tools around, next time is crashed I had the stack un-spool itself and it told me the problem was somewhere in the nVidia DLL's. Hitting the support forums for the game, sure enough there's a notice that on 64 bit Operating System users need to disable PhysX until further notice. I duly did this, and no crashes... for a while. CRASH.

What the heck is going on here? I get along trying to play this increasingly frustrating situation, and in the end I just give up. I decide that instead of spoiling the experience, I'd put it down for a patch to arrive. There was an admittance of a problem and a fix promised, I was determined to become the zen master and wait this problem out. So my misses got to see me that night... not a good trend to set, when you've been so stoked to play a game, and she thinks two hours was plenty of time to have played it for...

Anyway, next evening I get in from a long day at work, and low and behold a patch is available for Dragon Age... YAY.. I pamper the misses and I get food done and sit down to play.. YAY it's working... CRASH.

Not a good moment... I don't try to force it this time, I close the game and go scour the support forum again, no biggy, still problems for 64 bit OS users... right, leave it, come back later... Oh and the PhysX problems are only for 8800 card users... DAMN....

Next evening, suggestions to turn off PhysX and SLi... okay.. give it a whirl... CRASH.

Next evening, patch 1.0b... hurrah.... CRASH.

Next evening, nothing new …. CRASH.

That following Monday I got around to firing it up again, and there's a new new patch out... I set it going, all looks fine... I play for a good hour... CRASH. This time it's taken the whole saved game with it, and for some reason this includes a load of progress made, so frustratingly I replay a large section of the game. Only to CRASH again.

In the end, I've put the game aside, four patches, countless passes of the forums and I've not yet stoked up my interest enough to go look at the game again. I might this evening.... Might being the operative word.

But my problem with all this, isn't really that the game crashed, because I accept that they can't possibly have tested all the possible hardware and software configurations out there affecting the behaviour of such a complex thing as a game (and believe me, modern games are very complex). No what's bothering me is that I paid for this game... I shelled out near enough £35 to it... but I couldn't play it straight out the box.

In effect I could have waited six months, or a year, gotten it at a budget price or re-release price before too long from now and been able to patch it and most importantly, it would have missed this terrible knock in my want to play the game and cost me less money!

Now, I wonder if we all make a patch right now, to NOT rush to buy the new titles, to not go rent them from blockbuster for our consoles for a fortune, to NOT pre-order them. But we all let game houses know that actually we will only buy the games when a. they're finished.. and b. they don't cost a bomb. Surely then we'd get better quality output? Certainly we'd not all be falling for this propaganda of excellent infinite promises which are not being lived up to in oh so many cases...

And, yes I use propaganda there as a term of derision, we are getting all these trailers and airbrushed up art, even CGI promo's we even see great promises made about games from shows like GPC & PAX. But do these large developer houses actually ever deliver?

I mean, Indy developers make their name and profit margins swell by releasing good, clean, working software. Yet larger houses seem to get away with murder, just because they have fancy artwork and a good PR man.

Think on... Budget titles which work.... or empty pockets and no play... Has that latter ever happened to you?




If you've had a game which was a buggy mess, reply below.



Stick around for my next post, which I think will be about a bug in a game which turned out to be a benefit...