Wii U - Will Fail

Taking a long look at the images released of the new Nintendo Wii U games console, I can only see it being a huge and obvious flop.

Its too bulky, has no cool feel, its performance and specifications are way down on the ladder, there is in fact nothing the device offers that a smart phone already does and smart phones are cool.

This thing may possibly sell in Japan, but for the rest of the world, its going to sink like a stone.

Personally, I wish companies would realise that devices like this don't seem to catch on.  The original GameBoy caught on big time, it filled a void not just a niche.  There was no rival anywhere near the GameBoy, and to some extent its carried that legacy into the newer DS devices range.  But this Wii U is going to go the same way as the Atari Lynx, which it seems to ape in so many ways.

And its to the Lynx I now turn, the Lynx for its part was designed by a creative team, one of its leaders R. J. Mical is a great, and fun, guy; whos fame spreads back to the Amiga 1000 development.  But no-one turned around to that team and really scrutinised the product, sure it had a nobel and dedicated fan base, some people "loved that giant machine". But it was too big and bulky for the main stream.

And here we are 23 years later with Nintendo, the company whom (lets face it) sank the Lynx, stepping themselves over those exact same mistake sink holes full of lava... They'll sink, but they don't seem to see it.

DayZ Bullet Physics versus Trees

Well, after a week without internet and a very busy day having new carpets fitted, and sorting out a whole bunch of my old junk, I sat down; with the wife - she's so cool; to play some DayZ.

Now, my internet (wireless) signal has been really really screwy, with all the stuff moved about in the house we're getting echo's and shadows in the signal all over the house, so my connection has been so flakey to servers.  I got disconnected from like three servers after a few minutes and then finally got connected to a stable server.

I was on an UK server, that had myself, one other person and then a group of three guys all with the same clan icons "[A2]" I think... Anyway, I hit a military camp and then start to make my way north, rain is bucketing it down and as I enter a small clump of tree's, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, I hear the zip of a shot and then another zip of a shot...

Someone is shooting at me, from an unknown, very distant location... But I can't figure out where from... I can't hear the gun, just the shots hitting the tree's around me... And I can't see any flash of the gun in the dark...

I was tempted to squeeze off a whole mag of M14A1 fire into the blackness, to try to freak them out into moving away, but they don't... I can still hear lots of rounds hitting the tree's, but no direction...

I moved out of cover, and got hit in the legs... luckily I have bandages, morphine and plenty of meat to make up the blood loss and crawl under cover...

And this is where the problems kicked off... I started to lag again, I can hear shots ripping up the foliage above me, and I can't move with a yellow lag out... Suddenly my character glitches onto a small wall and stands up... FUCK FUCK... and I lay down again, but too late, I get hit again, and have to seek refuge to kneel and bandage again.

I think the bandage went on, and then red connection... GAH!!!

But, this was fine, I waited in the bush, hoping it would come back, but it never did so I let the thing fall over and tried to get back on.

It was thrilling, my stupid connection broke the situation, which was intense... But in the end I cowardly left it... And didn't dare go back, or try, with my connection.

Now, this brought me to thinking, what was wrong with the situation?... I could not get a bead on a return shot... I could not hear the shots coming in, just their landing, and I could not hear the source weapon... This was problematic at best...

At worst it was a right royal pain in the back side, I wanted to turn and loose some covering fire in the general direction and then set about running out of there... but which direction?

Now, the shots coming in were hitting the bushes and making a specific sound... so there is a trigger so the game knows that the shots hit the foliage... All it needed was an effect, where leaves and such came out of the tree's in the trail of the bullets, then I'd have known the direction the fire was coming from...

My awesome MSPaint SkillZ

I'm going to post this on the forum, as a suggestion, I think... It'd help those of us (like me) who like to hang out in the bush, rather than spend time in the concrete.

Insurance

Insurance companies are free loading con artists, this is an informed and opinionated situation I have come to understand in the most dastardly fashion.  Last year an idiot sped up behind me and lost it, there was no damage to my vehicle and I was not particularly bothered, the woman however was irate, her kids were screaming she was going on and on about being late for a train and she started to take pictures of my car on her smart phone.

So I went to write down her number plate and she screamed at me, tore up the little scrat of paper I had her plate on and she left the scene....

This meant I had a mental woman with my details... And I had nothing....

So, like the good boy I am, I phoned my insurer and let them know... that this was NOT a claim, and I DO NOT WANT TO CLAIM... But this mad woman has my details and is irate... I duly was told by the operator that "no this is not a claim, don't worry, it won't affect your situation"... yadda yadda.

I paid as much mind to this as to fluff under my bed, it was not important, there was no damage, just an irate woman screaming at me... when she was at fault....

Anyway, today I got a renewal quote for my insurance... £917.... WHAT THE FUCK!  I've never ever paid more than £300... ever... And I have (in my youth) actually crashed cars twice.  So to have as far as I'm aware got 14 years no claims and am not paying £917...

I phone the insurer and yes this incident with this irate woman is only down as an actual incident.  I pursued no claim, I never phoned the insurer with the intention of making a claim, I just didn't want her phoning her insurer and claiming I've damaged her car, or calling the police (as she was screaming about) and saying god knows what.

So, I let my insurer know... And you know what they've done?... Added £750 to my quote and cancelled my no claims bonus... I am currently going mental at them... They're going to listen to my original phone call in, and we'll see what they say, but I can't listen to that recording (of my own voice) because "there's a procedure and you have to pay £10"... I'll not mention the insurer in question, but right of now, I've spoken to one nice lad who put me through to a really supercilious sounding lass, a lass who is going to listen to this recording "with my manager".

They're intent on getting my money, and I'm intent on not letting them... This lot have got a lot of work to suck up to me to get my custom back.

Connection or Not...

I'm a little bit surprised that there's suddenly a post from the DayZ team, from Rocket himself, regarding where the mod is going.  Especially since there was nothing said in so long... Its nice to see a post, but the reason for it... I'm not so sure.

The post itself says nothing new... "The patch will be released when its ready"... yadda yadda.  Its not addressed any of the other posts save to blanket them all with the statement "I've been watching and reading and collating your posts".

Yet the only officially released information about the future of the game is about adding dogs... Before they add dogs, they could do with fixing the inventory, the reliability of disappearing guns, the problem of texture popping.... I know most of my problems, with the game, are probably problems with the engine used.  But the guys behind the mod now do work for Bohemia, so they have access to the code all their releases so far have been server side code, they may have also fed fixes or updates into the AO2 beta executable, but they've not officially admitted this...

And, they suddenly post this non-post.  Why?

Well, I actually sent a missive to the team, firstly offering my help, being a veteran forum jockey and modder myself.  And second saying "please post"... I do wonder whether my message met the right ears... Certainly if they simply googled the information I posted they'd know who I am, and that I'm not full of shit when I offer help for the reasons I gave, so I do wonder whether my message garnered a response.

DayZ Middleware Madness

We really are loving DayZ this end, I say we as its only the second title that the wife is willing to sit down and play along side me, acting as my spotter for all the hopping, crawling, scurrying and stumbling zombies around our collective character.

Our character whom has finally, after about a week of playing haplessly, managed to survive three whole days in game.  This is a record for us, and something of a note for the rest as its been done in the most trying of circumstances.

You see, there's some problem with the FPS, but only on certain servers.  Now the server base for the game already looks very very fragmented, with different groups running different versions of the server software (or at least versions labelled differently) with different settings in different time zones with different anti-cheat protection and different local rules and scripts.  The end result is one can spend a solid half hour trying to not only find a server which will work (the fps problem goes away) but actually a server that will let you in and stay in.

"You have been kicked because of battleye script restriction #40"... or #90... or #187... or whatever are common place, there is no explanation for this, neither from the battleye site itself, nor the DayZ team or the server hosts.  Clerver dicks residing upon the DayZ forum suggest telling the server administrator about being kicked, that they (the server host) needs to update their battleye script... But, you can't find out who these people are... I've tried to track down four different server hosts to tell them that their servers insta-kick... But I feel sometimes its a loosing battle.

Some server hosts simply keep themselves secret, they lock down their server, and only allow themselves to play on it... With all the riches of their cache going onto their hive bound character they can then jump into other servers with impunity and harvest rich murder counts and hassle other players.  I've even had one (whom I will not name) mail me back, "U winey biatch just coz we got da idea 2 keep srva 4 us an get da gears"... Its like... WTF... I just mailed you to tell you your server has a battleye script restriction and insta kicks after an embarrassingly long wait on the loading screen... Yet you mail be back admitting you are fraudulently farming gear in the game?

This attitude seems rife, the DayZ team don't seem to be making much effort with the plethora of posts regarding server spoofing going on, I think that infact they're overwhelmed with the numbers.

And there's the problem, the numbers, I remember working on the forums for "The Lordz" managing the machinations of a few hundred people each day, and there was always one moron trying to goad you, or get a rise out of you; they call them trolls now-a-days, we called them "Surfs".  So I can relate to the DayZ team struggling with over a million players gaggling at the gates each morning.  But, I can't really accept that they can't put up a post on their own forums explaining a few things.  My recent post about the servers being down, it became a really very popular post from the internets to my blog... No DayZ member ever got back to me... yet I had over 250 visits to my site... The trouble shooting section on the DayZ forum, the Bug reporting section and indeed the dedicated development bug tracker they have in place are swamped with issues, not the least of which is that if DayZ becomes a real stand-alone product then they need to polish it.

Yet there's no reply.  I've seen "Rocket" on the youtubes, I've seen his look and attitude to the game, he plays in a group, he plays on servers he controls (I don't doubt), he and his crew don't (at least I don't think) go out into the wild hillbilly world of finding a server like myself, like any player new to the game would.

I for my part am patient and look at my local kit, check its working and then select through lots of servers to find one working... Others won't, they'll just say "fuck this shit"...

Yes, the game is "in alpha", but when something is in alpha you're generally releasing it to get feedback, I just think the reaction the team have is now so overwhelming that they can't hear the sound for the noise.  And we definiately can't hear them disseminating any news.

Right now, I hope they update the server software, bringing all the servers listing different versions together into a single version which works, looking at the server browser right now I can see 95948, 96063, 96061, 95883, 95913 and 96015 all listed as the version of the mod/game servers are running... This fracturing is terrible and the main cause of my frustrations with the game.

It was also the source of my problems with the crowbar, I picked it up on a server able to give it me, 96061, but then played on servers running 95938 and 95953, meaning I couldn't use, or put the thing down... very annoying and all server side, no indication given that it was my machine, or the hive... gah for middleware madness.

Online Gaming in a Browser

It is with some surprise that I come to blog about a new service from Square Enix.  Those delightful Japanese RPG devils have come up with a new service "CoreOnline" which is to stream high end console titles (from the mid-naughties) to your web interface - via their own service.

Its only a beta right now, and unlike other offerings it claims to run in the browser, which is intriguing enough to get me to perhaps take a look.

However, the service is nothing new, indeed the partly BT funded "OnLive" service has been offering the same idea with more than just console titles for over a year.

The suprise however comes about because this new service is so much like OnLive, and only last week their CEO walked out after the company was forced to sell its assets in order to pay its venture capital firm a return.

Maybe the Japanese can do better than OnLive, who knows.  There are now two Japanese controlled services of this ilk, this new offering by Square being one, the other being "Gaikai" which was recently purchased outright by Sony.

DayZ Web Servers Down - 29/8/2012

I was hoping to post this on the actual game forums, but I can't the service is so bad & patchy I've given up and come to my own blog, so anyone reading this imagine you're on www.dayzmod.com/forum in the troubleshooting section.

I am having a lot of problems using anything pointing to the dayzmod.com URL, this includes the site the forum anything, I also believe the Hive is being affected.

I am based in the Midlands of the UK, and have been having this problem for days now, whenever I try to access the site I get a long pause, followed by a message from "CloudFlare" telling me that "Website currently unavailable".

I have looked at the trace information to the site and see no problem getting to the site, just that the site is clearly so busy it is unable to serve my request... Is the DayZ site being subjected to a denial of service attack?... Or are there Zombies loose in the  datacenter?

Whatever the reason/problem, this is rather infuriating, more so for the fact that there is no acknowledgement of a problem by any admin/dayz team member anywhere.

So, straw poll, anyone else getting this?