I’m reading through Cyanide and Happiness archives, and this comic is great, and perfectly says why I avoid Ctrl+Alt+Del and similar webcomics.
All posts by Andrew Armstrong
New Year and All That Jazz
Happy 2010! Except there hasn’t been any 2010 yet…so I guess, Happy 2009! Hope it was a good year.
What will I be doing in 2010…always nice to plan a bit.
Well, first I need to fix my watch, which stopped on the 2nd of January, must be the battery dying. I did almost lose it on the last day of work before Christmas too, so I don’t want it to break properly now 🙂 had it for years.
Properly though, I have enjoyed most of my work in the University of Nottingham’s IS Customer Services (in the Computer Suite Support Group). However, I need to look around for a new job. Pending the end of January, I hope to have at least found some possibilities, that involve coding/programming or at least more highly paid IT work 🙂 I also want to work out of Nottingham – one thing I’d love to do is get a cat which I can’t do at home (Mum’s allergic). A little thing, but a pet beyond a goldfish, well, specifically a cat, is something that I’d love to have.
I’m going to try and swear less when I’m flustered. Mainly this is at work when dealing with very minor and silly things, and Windows, lots of nice pretty Microsoft Windows. I mean, it’s silly, but if you swear for little things, nothing can really nail big things.
I’ve got a whole new set of books to read (filling out my Iain M. Banks collection) and films to watch now (Studio Ghibli films mainly 😀 ), so that is covered. There are lots of games I’ve still got to even start playing (Super Mario Galaxy, Farcry 2, Grand Theft Auto 4, Icewind Dale, Planescape Torment and others…the list is growing, stupid Steam sales included…), and I’ve started actually planning some other things, like going to a few classical concerts at Nottingham’s Royal Concert Centre. Not really much to say “I’ll do things differently this year”, but having a long list is a good thing (still need to get to posting what I think are really good things to read/watch/do/verb here).
I should write up more critiques, thoughts and mini-review pieces on things worth posting about though. Need to get into a rhythm for that, and not let this site slip into “ahhh, can’t be bothered this week” territory.
I really need to do more programming. Much more. I’ve been really lax at this (I’d say avoiding it, but it’s more like I don’t have anything I need to code, so I’ve not done much!), mainly since I’ve done other things here and there that keep me from it. Now I’ve got a nice fast PC, a server, (soon to be) automated backups, none of which are needed but do help keep my mind at peace, I plan to do some code writing and some other projects when I have time. Will help my job hunting too 🙂
Lots more to do archive-wise, with a server I can now more regularly upload to the Internet Archive, and who knows what else I can get up to with the IGDA Preservation SIG (website teething problems notwithstanding).
Hmm, well, that’s pretty much it. Nothing else exciting planned. Maybe I should plan something more exciting? Wait, why do that if I’m finding all this enjoyable? Why am I even writing this paragraph in the first place? Hah! my own self indulgent new years rubbish to add to the web, and why not! 😉
Avatar
I need to post more! I will do shortly now I’m on Xmas Holiday 😀 Anyway, Avatar, the film – let it be known, I have not seen a film more packed with cliché, plot rippoff and tropes (or to put it more nicely, “Homages”, “inspired bys” and “reused plot devices”). The actual avatars were a bit unique at least, and in some places it was much better directed then the rest even if the dialogue script was terrible, and I had fun plotting out what would happen in advance, I guess – kinda cruel in a way though to the film, which was hard to take very seriously. Kinda average, and that’s that I guess – Moon is still my Sci-fi film of the year, actually my favourite film of the year in general. See that instead if you haven’t! 🙂
Saw it in 3D, and not massively disappointed, just in this case wasn’t much special. Oh well!
It’ll be (is?) a hit and miss film for sci-fi fans that’s for certain. At least this is a spoiler-free review 😉
Culture!
I am constantly finding things I should do, watch, see, play, listen to, read, think about and enjoy. Cultural things – all kinds of games, plays, music, film, TV, books…etc. I’m making smallish lists and looking out for things when I have a chance to see them. I think it is well worth sharing these kinds of things. No site would be complete without some lists right? Well, I’ll do them sooner or later! Also, I’m always on the lookout for gaps in my knowledge – the extremes, the pinnacles of culture, the magnum opus pieces. I’ve missed many, even if I do peruse TV Tropes a lot 😉
So, anyone have anything that in their opinion, I (and others) should watch, see, play, listen to, read, think about or enjoy before I die? Surprise me 🙂 but I’m happy with nothing, just means I’ll be asking a lot more people in person, hehe!
I’ll take on all offers and at least try it too! I’ve found a lot of worth in things I have disliked for whatever reason. Not that I’d necessarily get to it immediately, I do have some lists of things to do for a while 🙂 but it’s always worth looking ahead! I’ll put down my must sees, and additional interesting recommendations, especially for videogames soon, and of course most of the things I’ve posted about have been for a good reason if you want a hint of some. I have several draft posts for things I’ve finished or enjoyed to finish off too.
Haruhi Suzumiya’s Looping Episodes
An Infinity Of Episodes
In a fit of what must have been totally silly padding efforts or utter genius, the second season of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya has 8 episodes all called Endless Eight. As pointed out on TV Tropes, it’s a weird thing – there are basically 8 nearly identical episodes in plot but serve up different animations, dialogue and so forth. I just found it fascinating, so I’m going to discuss it (also, because I really like Groundhog Day 🙂 ). Continue reading Haruhi Suzumiya’s Looping Episodes
AI War
Tutorial Fun
After League of Legends I need some better games to post about, so I’ll be posting about them this week! The first up is AI War, which took a good part of my weekend up. The game itself is a large-scale sci-fi co-op RTS game against the CPU. It also has elements of tower defence (against waves of enemies based at choakpoints), tactical battles (some micromanagement and work there) and the classic Turn Based Strategy stuff like long term resource management, technology research, strategic thinking and so forth.
The aim is to defeat the two AI forces (having very well defended bases) who get increasingly angry and competitive as you take over the map.
Long Time Playin’
Zoomed out on a planet map.
Just from the outset if you don’t like playing long games, don’t play this game. It’s Civ4-long, hours and hours to complete a campaign. I’ve only played the tutorial and that took all weekend! 🙂
For me this is perfect – I’ll probably play by myself but I hope to get some interested people who frequent the WDG forums to play too. I am sure I’d enjoy it by myself but I want to try out co-op possibilities.
The reason is the strategic long-term elements are well thought out. There is actually some reason to not kill every enemy on every planet (each planet being connected by wormhole chokepoints to other planets, each planet is an 2d RTS map). You get waves of enemies only from planets which have gates that spawn them, and you can destroy AI data banks of the enemy to hinder progress – every offensive action is met with the AI pumping up the difficulty, which this hinders slightly. Raids like this are important it appears. Expand too fast and you have tough ships destroying you before you know it. Some planets just are not worth conquering for the natural resources, or are just chokepoints to more important planets. Some have unique things to capture which require the complete annihilation of the AI on the planet to make it safe.
With co-op the fun would come from multiple fronts being fought, co-operative army usage and gifting and so forth. Should be fun to try! (much like a Civ4 game played in real time).
Battles and Combat
Overwhelming Assault
All the battles are massive amounts of ships. Simply check all the screenshots I’ve uploaded! You have to get hundreds of ships to do simple tasks, and thousands to do anything remotely hard. Each ship does its own targeting which is a godsend – it is pretty much fine for people poor at micromanagement, and mainly the tactical part comes from positioning ships, formations, groups and luring enemies, hitting them with a timely wave of firepower, retreating and raiding.
The unit types are also varied – there are more then a standard trio of rock-paper-scissors, and certainly is a large part of the strategy (especially which to upgrade into better versions). You get ship caps per tier of ship – so you don’t instantly get every ship to level 2 once you research it, meaning you always have a mixed force of different levels since even the lower level ships can act as cannon fodder to save the higher level ones.
Resources and Tech
Conga Line of Production
Resources come in the Total-Annihilation way of constant streams – crystals and metal being the two base items. They work pretty fundamentally like Sins of a Solar Empire if you’ve played that. You also have power being a constant number – either you’re in the black or red there, with X power costing X crystals and metal a second depending on your power plants. This keeps a cap on the amount of ships and expansion you can achieve with a limited amount of planets.
Technology means unlocking new turrets, defences, economic buildings, higher rated ships and so forth. You get 2000 points of knowledge per planet from science ships docked there. This means you can hop into enemy planets, and if well defended (or not provoked too much) you can sap some knowledge quickly and not have to take the planet entirely to get more technology. I’ve not had a chance to use a lot of it, but there are some interesting things I’ve not tried much of (force fields and turret defences, large powerful star ships, additional economic buildings and so forth).
Agressive AI
Battle! (Not much interesting going on)
I can’t honestly comment much on the AI. The tutorial sets it in “No attacks, AI level 1” – which is pathetically easy to lure out on each planet and destroy with smaller forces. However, I see much potential – and the AI ships do know how to handle themselves. Not thinking will get your entire force massacred (as happened to me attacking a building in the final planet which drew every AI unit there to attack me!). There are obviously AI personalities, and difficulty levels, which will likely make it a lot more fun to defend against and purposely raid. They are certainly out to get the players, even the tutorial warns you that you could lose quite easily if you’re not careful!
Since I built the wrong units the last enemy base took a while to kill too:
Final Base 1: The Beginning of the End
Final Base 2: More Firepower
Final Base 3: Carry on Hitting...
Final Base 4: Still needs more...
Final Base 5: Still needs a little more...
Final Base 6: Finally destroyed! AI good riddance!
20 minutes or so! Mainly because I built the wrong units to attack it at the end. Also I really need to sort the alignment of multiple images. I’ll do a slideshow next time.
Fun!?!?
It is 2D, although since you zoom out a lot to get a better perspective, this matters little. There are some issues getting things done fast unless you know your hotkeys (such as building new buildings means finding a single unit who can build), but I can forgive that – it’s not a game that needs rushing all the time, and if you’re so unprepared to have to build in battle you might have already lost. The core gameplay also hasn’t got any alternatives – it is against two AI’s and that’s that. I guess it is balanced entirely around this, but you can choose a wide option from the amount of planets (thus length of the game) and other things.
In the end though it was fun playing the tutorial. Fun to toil destroying those faceless AI dregs! FUN TO RUIN THAT SILLY AI! MUAHAHAHAH! *ahem*. The competition against more then just an equal opponent makes a nice edge. There looks to be a lot of difficulty and personality options with the AI, and co-op will be fun to try out. It was satisfying to destroy the tutorial AI – as you can see above! Worth trying the trial and playing the tutorial, and was £13, which is quite good considering the price of some games 🙂
Fight Rage of Conflict
A great little series of game parodies and jokes!
League of Legends
League of Legends (American Version) Loads
Well, League of “Sucky Download Speeds, Horrible Client Frontend and Beta Status” I guess 😉
Basically this was recommended by Idle Thumbs, and the gameplay, once you get to actually playing a game, is pretty fun. It all comes down to if you like controlling a single unit in RTS style, in a standard non-dynamic battlefield, working with random people, and destroying an enemy base. This is Defence of the Ancients, one of a few games out now or coming out soon that mimic the gameplay. I will probably try the other two soon.
Horrible Downloads
Let’s get one thing straight though. The League of Legends team has this not going for it: it’s hopelessly confusing getting the damn thing installed.
League of Legends utterly useless downloader.
Now, should a what-might-be-kinda-a-review point this out? YES! Because I am now, while writing this, spending an hour re-downloading the European version of the game from lol-europe.com, whereas I previously slowly downloaded the American client at leagueoflegends.com. Just so I can play with the single person I have on Steam who also has it. Oh, did I mention this uses bittorrent to simply mean I can’t get it reasonably fast? The download is 750MB in size, and only available though the crappy “download clients” which are hopelessly slow (50 minutes and counting, fluctuating between 50KB/s and 200KB/s).
League of Legends Doesn't Like Your Duplicate Name!
I also need to make a brand new account. Gee, thanks for wasting my time. Oh, not that it is easy to find on the main page. Nope, it’s either some random popup (which I closed assuming I didn’t need another account and because I just wanted to browse the site!) or buried at the bottom of the FAQ page, pointing here. Also, for some reason the “Summoner” name can’t be the same as the “Username” despite them being the same thing. I don’t understand this at all. I am sure the main League of Legends site doesn’t have this requirement.
Finally, once it’s downloaded, wait! No, don’t play just yet, you need to download the ton o’ updates first! Oh, why oh why isn’t the installer updated to take these updates into account? Don’t ask me! 🙁
No, Riot, I’m also not going to make it easier to use your crappy download tools (which don’t allow direct downloads, it appears) by opening my firewall. Although you seem to use my upload speed regardless 🙁 This is not how you get me to enjoy your game. Beta or not, this is entirely the opposite of fun. Gah!
The Frontend
The American version (since I don’t have the seemingly entirely incompatible European version installed yet) the front end is more a flash web app (yes, it installs a flash toolkit to run, so it is a flash web app). It’s pretty poor to navigate, sluggish, help is non-existent, parts of it are incomplete (obviously, it’s in beta) or seemingly not functioning.
(Jumped up to 56 minutes left now!). The actual thing isn’t terrible once you can find a game you can join (no filters, so tough luck getting rid of the locked likely bot-only games), although it takes a fair amount of time just to start the game – choosing a character and the spells (the only two choices you need to do) is fine to give you some time to do, but it had waited the whole 1:30 when I played with bots. I honestly can’t remember if it also did this when I played with humans, who knows…
Then it finally gets to loading the actual game.
The Game
(51 minutes left). The game is pretty much a Warcraft III-looking thing. The GUI is certainly streamlined to doing the one thing you can, that is, controlling your one character. The actual graphics are fine, functional even if a little confusing at times – effects stack up in weird ways, making you unsure of what bad effect you’re under at times unless a popup says specifically “slowed!”.
The game is all about destroying some towers, getting to the enemy base, and destroying it. They do the same – it’s a mirror map (sadly – since I’d love to see some unbalanced maps – attack, defend, different allies etc.). You also have some additional neutral creatures to kill for money if you like. It’s nothing much more then the original mod it was taken from, although I prefer the shop being in one place, the second 2 lane map is fun too.
(Jumped to 1 hour! 574MB left…). You do get a vast choice of heroes – and it is certainly more fun having a large amount of things to choose from. Be prepared to die a lot, of course, since the whole point is to kill the strong enemies heroes first, before you can get anywhere near the enemy base. I also really really like having suggested gear to buy – simply put the interface is pretty terrible for quickly finding something suitable to buy with your cash. No options for “more damage rather then health” or something, but it’s a good feature to have.
You can practice against bots. They’re pretty boring, likely because of their beta status – only playing a few types of heroes, at 2 easy difficulty levels. A shame really, especially since they could take over people who have disconnected in the main game if they were done right.
Oh, I don’t have any screenshots in-game for some reason. Can’t get any from the American version since I uninstalled it due to thinking the European version would be quick to download (hah!).
So…
Give it a shot while it’s free. Choose the right damn one first though, don’t ask me, I’m still confused why they can’t be the same service since there are barely any beta players as it is, and I got reasonable ping times (since RTS games don’t need amazing ones) in any case! I think many people I played with were the same too – the totally inexcusable complexity of it all is mind-numbing to me. For this reason I think I’ll be put off buying playing it it (edit: I got told it is free, well, Microtransaction free – wait to see how much is pay-to-unlock, hmm, and being free doesn’t get it off the hook), and certainly need to look at the alternatives first.
(It’s gone up to over an hour now! Time to upload some pictures…).
DAMMIT
League of Legends EU Downloader Crashes
THE DOWNLOAD CLIENT JUST CRASHED SINCE I WANTED TO STOP THE STUPID UPLOADING SO I COULD UPLOAD PICTURES FOR THIS POST. I manage to restart it and it decides there is ONE HOUR AND A HALF LEFT. It is utterly raping my upload speed, tons of connections and it can’t get more then 100Kb/s.
Upload this crap to fileshack or something! ANYTHING IS BETTER THEN THIS. EVEN STEAM WORKS BETTER THEN THIS! 🙁
I give up. I’ve played the American version and only getting the EU one to play with someone I know. It won’t change the gameplay, which is a shame it’s wrapped up so badly. I just hope for their sake they get it together and offer basic ways to get the game without this rubbish first. This seems to be gold-release Beta stage for them, and likely is what it will be at release. I am sad at this. Very sad.
Says 2 hours 30 now… 🙁
GameCity Squared
Zombiefied ear!
I’ve been at various events held at GameCity Squared (or GameCity 2009) this year. Some good, some bad, and some mediocre. Lets see what’s what 🙂
Continue reading GameCity Squared
New PC and Windows 7
Okay, so not many posts recently, since I’ve brought myself a new PC and am currently battling the beast that is Windows 7, the ATI drivers from Hell and EDID monitor information being lost. Many reinstalls right now (when I’m writing this Windows 7 is “Expanding Windows files” 🙂 ).
This is my site so I’m putting down what I’ve got. Why not? I spent enough on it all 🙂
System
So, I decided basically to plan it around the i5 CPU, that recently came out, based on its lower cost and the fact i7’s had no massive amount of speed boosts and HyperThreading isn’t necessary on a gaming box. Made some discussions (which include prices I won’t bother to list below) on my clans forum, mainly going around what to get between SSD’s and HDD’s, with some coming out just at the right time (and lower price then they are now) at Overclockers, meaning I went for 2x64GB SSDs with a complementary 1TB HDD. This was, I hoped, going to be fun (to run in RAID-0).
Graphics card was the newly released 5850 (which was a darn bit cheaper then the 5870), from ATI (who’s drivers I never liked, and we’ll see why I dislike them more soon). I reused my sound card (Creative X-Fi ExtremeMusic), got a ASRock motherboard based on price and because it both had PS/2 ports and lacked some of the rubbish other boards had (more then having a ton of features), and an Antec case with 4 fans slots I filled so they could be run at low/medium speeds for constant air.
I also went for 8GB of RAM – so it’s 64 bit all the way. Final details are:
- i5 Processor
- 8GB G.Skill Ripjaw DDR3 PC3-12800C8 1600MHz (This needs a bit of overclocking to get 1600Mhz. Still fast though)
- ASROCK P55 PRO
- Antec 200 Two Hundred Ultimate Gaming Case (yes, that’s its title. Main thing was 4 fan slots and a reasonable design – it also has a nice hot-swapping thing for SATA drives I might well use).
- Corsair 620W HX Modular PSU (basically worked well on my old PC).
- XFX ATI Radeon HD 5850 1024MB (mainly got this for 2 reasons – better then nVidia’s offerings at the price, and supports 3 displays)
- Crucial M225 64GB (supposedly up to 200MB/s read, 150MB/s write).
- Maxtor 1TB Hard Drive (mostly cheapest 1TB drive. Also provides a good benchmark for the SSD’s performances)
- 2 LG DVD writers
I also ordered (and am awaiting on) the cheap HANNSG 27.5″ screen (hooking it up via. HDMI should be okay), to make up the 3 monitors along with my 2 existing ones.
My old PC will be used as a new server (redundancy with RAID-5 and RAID-1 setups, constant backups, services running on it, etc.) which is a good use of the box 🙂
Windows 7
Why get this at all? I’ve been using XP for ages. Windows 7 finally, I think, makes Vista useful enough to use. Basically tones down a lot of the unresponsiveness and useless parts of Vista and gives back a button to shut down in the start menu 🙂
In any case I mainly wanted it to, as I said above, upgrade to 64bit properly. This introduces annoying driver signing (which can at least be temporarily disabled for certain tools I might need to use), but otherwise means I can make use of lots of RAM.
Windows 7 Installs – RAID/SSD stuff
I’ve been using the Windows 7 RC this week until this evening when I got out the Windows 7 Professional that got delivered today. The first point of concern was the use of RAID-0 and the SSD’s. HDTune decided that instead of massive performance gains from RAID-0, it should be slower then my 1TB HDD!
Secondly, there are issues using any RAID with SSD’s. TRIM is useful for keeping speeds constant, and there is no wiping tools made for RAID to do garbage collection for my Crucial SSD’s (and likely won’t be for a while).
Therefore, rather then fight for RAID-0, after I updated the firmware of my Crucial SSD’s, I’ve decided to just use them separately. Windows 7 plus the XP VM is 35GB alone, making it fill most of a single drive in any case.
In the future, if software RAID correctly supports SSD’s I’ll make a change over – if I can get Windows 7 installed so many times I’ll have it down to a T.
Odd thing is I need to enable RAID or IDE in the BIOS (rather then AHCI) to get the CD ROM drives to boot to install the OS. I’m going to mess around to see which is best…(just before I sleep after this, got 200mb/s read, 150mb/s write basically on larger files as advertised, which is nice, and better then before I updated the firmware). whew…long time doing all these combinations.
ATI Drivers
Stay tuned. I’ll get Windows 7 fully installed and tested before complaining that my RC experience was bad!
(However it was terrible. Constant crashes and blue screens – with no overclocking and seemingly no overheating from any part of the system – along with random bursts of 99% usage on the desktop, for no apparent reason, with random fixes I’ve still got bookmarked just in case I need to try them on what should be working drivers although the control panel is utterly terrible regardless…I tell you they’re trying to kill me here, I swear! Never again ATI! even if the performance far outranks nVidia!).
EDID woes
EDID is the Extended Display Identification Data in the firmware of monitors, set along DVI connections to the OS to check what modes a monitor can do.
Sadly, out of my two duplicate 22″ Iiyama monitors, one of them has an obvious EDID deficiency. Luckily XP never noticed this, except saying it was Non-Plug and Play. Windows 7 (and I assume Vista) however doesn’t like this.
My experience has been of utter frustration first of all figuring out that EDID existed in the first place. Then using several tools to read what Windows thought, what the monitor actually reported (which ended up being nothing – ie; there is an issue!) and so on.
Once I figured it out, I unsuccessfully failed to update the EDID with a copy from my other monitor (the tool simply didn’t work), and using Windows 7’s promising EDID override feature failed – likely because of two issues. The first is the ATI drivers (they barely noticed it existed at all most of the time), but secondly, since it never reported any EDID information in the first place, Windows likely didn’t notice the fact I provided EDID information in the new driver file (as it should be to override it). Or maybe it was the ATI drivers there again. I had some random success adding some custom resolutions, kinda, but it was a bit of a mess and ATI didn’t allow me to actually input a custom resolution despite the fact that Windows itself detected it simply as a Generic Doesn’t Want To Tell Me What Monitor It Is item!
I’m going to contact Iiyama if it is still in warranty (and likely even if it isn’t), and hopefully get it fixed that way.
Now, to sleep for me, I’ve got a long weekend ahead of me fixing this mess, or figuring out what I’m doing wrong overall at least 🙂