A blog about my rantings, including Games, Game Development, Gaming, Consoles, PC Gaming, Role Playing Games, People, Gaming tips & cheats, Game Programming and a plethora of other stuff.
Development Update, Runes of Magic launching with its multi-process, multi-window, shenanigans has been fixed into the multiboxer, so it can seamlessly open and send input to many local Runes of Magic Clients.
Here's a boring video of the software opening two Clients, the only human input is I do click "play" as the launchers open...
Still Looking for donations, so see yesterdays post!
I am proud to announce the first useful piece of software I'm creating, it is a whole suite of tools to help you multibox. This is the practice of using a single keyboard and transmitting the keys, or even mapping different keys (e.g. you press numpad 0 and on the target game it presses W) to multiple game clients.
The end result is you can play alone, controlling multiple characters, run dungeons alone, level up through hard content and essentially explore the world in the myriad of MMORPG's out there without the need for a guild or clan.
I'm creating this project off the back of my recent struggle with gaming, I have no-one to play with, and can't commit to a regular gaming schedule. Therefore I want to create my own PVE capable groups in the myriad of games you've seen be picking up and poking about recently.
The rubs is, I need your help in creating this software!
The project is advancing along its closed Alpha phase, I plan a Closed Beta, then an Open Beta before releasing v1.0. I will also be releasing network specifications for the message transmission protocol being used, so you can hook your own applications into mine and build bigger and bigger multiboxers (e.g. you could use my XML network transmitter with some code you wrote to echo the keys being received and forward them on over the internet).
However, I have no money, certainly not enough to pay for all the testing accounts I require, nor the web hosting to let you download this fine software! So I'm asking, please donate below.
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).
Many other multiboxers exist, however, I believe for the target selling price of £15 (which will be discounted for donators) you will not find as fully featured a piece of software:
Local Multiple clients (run 5 characters on your one machine)
LAN Control multiple clients on multiple machines (run a whole 40 man raid, your healers on one PC, your tanks in another, your DPS on yet others).
Support multiple games, including the initial Alpha and Beta target titles:
World of Warcraft
Runes of Magic
Lord of the Rings Online
Conan Online
Open XML configuration settings for easy and scalable configuration (remap 6 keys today, remap 60 tomorrow).
Support for Wine users (yes I will be bringing the boxer to Linux platform Wine users as part of the Beta).
My intial target for more detailed development is £250. With this I will be able to purchase more WoW accounts and group them together (features not available in the "Starter Edition" free to play).
Super Donator/Partner - If you wish to partner me in this development, I would be interested in hearing from any C++ or C# developers, but please beware I will not be showing you the source, nor making the project open source. This may require exchange of contracts and significant input from yourself.
Yes, you heard me, it is decided I'm never going back to that game... Not because of the cost, not because of the shit game mechanics, not even because of the seemingly cast amount of brain cells they've pulled out of the base requirements to play the game... No, I'm not going back now because of one very specific reason...
My beloved hunter class, my PVP, solo, questing finest... No longer has melee weapons... I played a nightelf hunter, twice over. I was a PVP demon with them, and I loved them... Can't play like that anymore, no more swords....
I just rolled a Dwarf hunter on the Standard Edition (Free to play) and was like.. "Where's my little starter axe"... opening the character sheet... Hmm, where's my main hand weapon slot?
Now, I could deal with them removing the quiver, it annoyed me I had to use a bag slot for it, I can handle them removing the arrows/ammunition requirement too... It was brain dead, getting ammo is a basic thing, though I did see long running raids Hunters did run out of ammo - if they were not ready for it - i.e. Engineer with a post box, mail yourself a load of extra ammo before raiding, when you've done a few bosses pop a postbox and replenish... simple, easy, but because some forethought is required, it seems Blizzard have dropped this totally.
But why drop the melee weapons?.....
I've checked forums and checked the patch notes, they went in 2012, and there seems to then be a slew of Human hunters... *cough*.. Human hunters, jesus, so they're new to the class and they go on and on with piss and vinegar about "No hunter should use melee"... "Melee Hunter = Bad Hunter".
Really? Cus I used to own, I was a demon, and I loved being able to run and slash and move... Okay, remove the minimum range for a hunter, fine, but don't remove the weapons.
Fire a gun at point blank range you're as likely to be hurt as the target...
And to whomever came up with this change at Blizzard... "You're a fucking retard"... Seriously... Der...
Whilst I was deep in WoW fandom Lord of the Rings online, or LOTRO, came out. I actually bought it and didn't enjoy it very much at all... I thought the story lines were all so pushed, and when I met Gandalf - and he claimed to know my brand new level 2 Dwarf - I was like... Hmmm... Too soon.
Well, now LOTRO is Free to Play, so I figured I'd take a look...
I don't remembering it looking as shit as this....
I've not had chance to set any graphics settings, so you'd assume they'd make it look as good as possible, I downloaded the HD version, and even had the game prompt me to use DirectX10 mode... So why does it look like ass?
This is the character creation screen... It should look fantastic.
I consider myself a veteran of the original WoW, I played Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Litch King and Cataclysm also, but I quit. I used to play at least 48 hours a week, more hours than I was working at a job!
But the good old days came to a close, I was just PVPing, they added the "easy" button on raid and group PVE progress... The whole vibe changed, I changed, so I stopped playing....
Recently I've said I fancy a taste of it again, luckily I can get that taste without paying, with the free Blizzard "World of Warcraft Standard Edition"... Which lets you play to level 20... So I set about giving a few things a look-see...
Of course I had to go see my favourite faction boss first of all... I'd heard he'd had a little accident...
You see when I played it was never possible to see the enemy raid your world boss, I mean once on Thunderhorn (EU) the first server I played on (which was PVE) did a Horde raid show up in Don Morugh to take on the Dwarven king, but they never even tried to get in the gates... It was a huge deal, world PVP then, a huge deal, this is before Alterec Valley, before you even queued for things, before even Meeting Stones outside the instances, if you wanted to go there you went to the door and walked in... Or in the best case your group had a warlock and they summoned you, with the help of at least two others!
Going on foot as a human to Ironforge was no big deal back in the day, you'd just walked up and down from one end of Westfall to Lakeshire and back anyways, you'd not yet reached the marching that was the marshes to Menethil, or even the Arathi Highlands.... You were green, this was vanilla WoW, zones had one flight point you didn't get a mount til 40, and so you walked... For months everyone on my server walked.
With the initial release of the game Ironforge was the main Alliance city, it had not only a bank but an auction house, I remember I never knew about the Auction house, I was living my adventures out of Stormwind, and I had no-one to sell my copper to, there was no trade chat with auction items, so I just spammed it selling 20 x copper bars for 10 silver, and I was making a bomb!... Only to later realize the folks buying from me were taking them and selling them for 1 gold per stack at the auction.
You therefore had to find somewhere to live out of Ironforge, now you generally didn't want your Hearthstone set to the city until level 60, you wanted to leave it set out where your quests were, so you made the arduous journey and flight back to the city - suffered the lagging and crowding the commons outside the AH and bank in Ironforge had - and you hearthed back out after your business.
But as the servers stabilized and I formed a guid with my friends, we picked somewhere to log off. Myself and the other guild master we both played Warrior, so of course we spent a lot of time at the warrior training, I also spent a lot of time in the original PVP system when it went live, and the battle master was in the warrior training area. With a secondary GM in the guild being a hunter and her training close by the guild HQ became Bruuk's Corner, a dwarven tavern in the warrior quarter of Ironforge, where we would retreat to to log off and hopefully not suffer the massive lags of logging on later.
I was happy in returning to the game to see the world, though changed by the cataclysm is still recognizable.
Though in some places old friends have new digs....
And other old friends have different places to be in the world...
Would I resubscribe to WoW? Well I spend my final days in the world trying to solo different places with my highly PVP geared mage & hunter. I also rolled a new dedicated Alt - a Druid - and took it to level 80, my first max level healer.
I just fell out of love with how easy the game was becoming, patch after patch, simplifying and pointing the way. When I realized I'd done a whole quest zone in my Druid - a complete 8 levels - in a little over an hour (this was level 72 to 80) and I thought... "I never even engaged my brain there, I never even had to read the quest text"... I knew it signaled a death knell for me.
I spent sometime solo'ing the original raid content from vanilla, ZG being a favourite and all the Blackrock stuff... But then my subscription lapsed and so the shades came down on my WoW days.
Going back, the simplify stick has been out with gay abandon... You can level in a zone in minutes, not even hours. You can mass loot things, a feature which annoyed me, and I can't even quite say why it annoyed me so much, it just bugged me, people can't be arsed to pick up their winnings... That's a new low, really.
But then the ultimate insult to the old game, you no-longer have to return to your class trainer to learn new skills, they just come up on the screen... This is just... I can't say how much this annoyed me, whomever came up with this being a good idea really should have thought again. It's a little like how they'll next remake the Karate Kid... "Danial-san, go paint fence, *tick tick tick* *DING* you now know Karate" NOOOOOoooooooo.
Just don't do this, what a ridiculous premise, yes going ALL the way back to the city to train, or the finding the warrior trainer behind the backsmiths was a right of passage, but it was part of life, part of the game, part of progressing... You soon learned to look forward to every even numbered level... "ooo what have I got coming, overpower! Coooooolllll".... Now it comes up in a sad pale blue text... Boring, and very missable.
If they changed this because there was some Level 80 Warrior stumbling around with only Heroic Strike & Charge, then so be it, they were a moron, if they had a million support calls for characters not having any skills "ah hey my warlock has only shadow bolt, but my friends has loads of skillz" the GM should have replied, "That's because you're not visited your class trainer to learn anything new you putz". The game should not have lowered itself.
And it was already pretty much the defacto lowest common denominator out there, a game so accessible as to win the hearts of the masses and become the biggest, and arguably best received, MMORPG in history (so far). But its lowered itself to the point now as to be a running joke.
And they've done this time and again, Blizzard this is, they've lowered the access level to gear, they've raised the inflation rate of gear levels, I moaned about this on Shut Up We're Talking #50 in 2008. I've been proven so unholy true I'm astounded. Mists of Panderia raised the predicted bar into the vertical exponential increase range... As pointed out by MikePreachWow
I dunno, the game I played, the game I loved and lived will never come back, ever... It leaves a legacy too high for many to follow or compete with... And its not a Free to Play, so I'm not going to re sub.
I play a lot of games, this generally means I have a lot of passwords, and I've learned from mistakes; thankfully made by others; to use different passwords on different games.
One game however does seem to stress online security more than others, it provides an on screen touch keyboard to use with the mouse, as well as allowing keyboard entry, so potentially foiling key loggers, and this is Runes of Magic, it is the only game I've come across which supports a primary and secondary password system, whereby there are two layers to get into the accounts to play.
Recently I tried to retrieve my Runes of Magic account, I logged into the primary password, but for the life of me could not remember the second...
So, I used the options to reset that secondary password, and the site told me the password has been reset....
Think about that word... "reset", if it has a value, it is set to a different value, like you "reset an alarm clock", it had a time to go off, not it has a new time to go off, you didn't cancel it, you didn't wipe it, you reset it...
So when this site said it has reset the secondary password, I just assumed it'd be given a new valie - like the primary was - and I'd use that to log in and change that secondary password... Nope, the site just said "reset"...
But what had it been reset to?... So I contacted their support their answer... "it has been cleared"...
Cleared is not reset, reset indicates a value just like resetting the primary did, please please Runes of Magic people sort this out.
To the confused public, when they reset the secondary password, they just clear it!
Yes, you maybe asking yourself that same question, I certainly did on the way home from work when the Radio said the Oscar winning composure "Steven Price" (just won for best score for Gravity) went to Top Valley Academy.
I went to that school, though at the time Steven and I went it was called "Top Valley Comprehensive", and rather than the current head master one Chris Archer was at the helm, along with Mrs Vernon, Mr Hughes and all the other well known faces of the day.
My trouble is I didn't know this chap, looking at this date of birth he'd have been a year above me, so that's understandable, but this still means I basically could have shared a urinal with a now Oscar winner for just over four years. That's a new claim to fame I can't wait to spring on someone.
I'm surprised by the link, he's already won awards from the BAFTA's and elsewhere, he worked on Lord of the Rings, and has been around the musical block.
Though the most surprising thing is... Mr Rose, he was the head of music at the time Steven and I were at Top Valley Comp... And all that chap managed to impose into my memory is the tune....
"Music is Fun,
Rum, tum, tee, dum.
Singing and playing,
will always be done"
That and the eternal image of Paul Wesley doing a decent rip off of "2 Unlimited". *cough*
Not impressive, so how did Steven manage to get out of the Valley and out to Hollywood... I have no idea, but I'd like to find out.
P.S. No pictures of Steven were available on the internet... least not without charging a fee... so here's a shot of Top Valley....
Sorry, sorry, that's not the place... That's too tidy...
