Category: Family

… where every character got their own story. Where the server would create an individual “path to glory” built around choices you make during character creation. You could factor in race and class (assuming the game had these notions), as well as other data you would provide, such as:

• Is your character good, evil or simply opportunistic?
• Is success for your character defined by money, fame, leadership,…?
• What is your character’s sexual preference?
• …?

Of course, the game would still be built from pre-canned collections of story arcs, but the designers would make sure that they could be mixed and matched in many ways, and the details could be subtly altered, so that it would really not be possible to build a hint site that showed the one true path through the game.

The amazing thing about this game would be that other players, as in real life, would be driven by motivations that didn’t exactly align with yours. Nor would they necessarilly be fighting over the same loot drops. Very cool.

Of course, in practice, I suspect that detecting all the possible ways that the variant quests could interact, and preventing bad interactions (or even deadlocks) would be NP-hard, but I can dream, can’t I?

It’s a ViewSonic VX922. It’s only 1280×1024, but it’s (theoretically) extremely fast; they claim a 2ms response time. I currently have it connected to my laptop at work, but the real test will be with my gaming PC at home. Sounds like a reason to play WoW tonight!

In any case, it’s bright, it has no stuck pixels, and even at 19″ it’s a *lot* bigger than my old 17″ CRT. I paid $329 at Best Buy. There are probably cheaper prices.

It’s out. Get it while it’s hot at the Callisto home page.

As always, I am totally amazed at how much dedication and effort the teams all put into getting this to come together. Way to go, all! Congrats! WOOT!

It’s amazing what changing the packaging on a device will do for its perceived quality. I picked up a Ninto DS Lite a couple of days ago…

Somehow, playing with the case design and materials took it from being a “grey plastic kid’s toy” to a “dual screen micro-iBook”. They also changed the surface of the touch screen to give it a more paper-like feel. All in all, I like it.

Of course, my only real reason for getting it was because it’s new tech, but I also picked up Electroplankton. If you haven’t seen it, I’m not sure I can explain it to you. It’s not really a game, but more like a musical toy. I expect to waste hours playing with it.

I had a chat with Todd this morning about the high-end game in WoW. Basically, I believe WoW is really two completely different games:

1. Until you hit level 60, the game is a group-oriented, but soloable RPG, where to a significant extent, your ability to progress is based on your relative level (versus the things you are fighting), followed by your skill at running the GUI, and then your gear.
2. At level 60, the game becomes essentially a squad-based (i.e. group or raid) action game, where the most important skill is your familiarity with a particular mission (i.e. “knowing the map”). Your skill with the GUI is still important (probably moreso), but for the more interesting content at least, your gear is critical. To see this, just ask all the players currently grinding for nature resist gear (which they didn’t think they’d ever need).

In any case, I’m not a big fan of the level 60 game in WoW. To me it feels like the rules changed just to keep the powergamers occupied. I realize that most MMO’s have this problem, and it’s not clear what they could do about it, other than release expansions. Here’s hoping that Burning Crusade gives me back the game I like to play for at least another 10 levels.

To preempt at least some of the flames: Yes, I know I can start a new character. Since I’ve played essentially every race/character class combination into the late teens — some into the late 40’s — and had characters on regular, rp and pvp servers, that’s starting to get old. I suspect I will start new characters in both of the races that come with BC, just to see the newbie area content, but given that it all funnels into the same stuff at around level 15, we’ll have to see how far I take them.

Anyway, here’s how the conversation with Todd went…

Todd — 9:13

Will you be joining us again tonight for another run on the Baron?

McQ — 9:14

Sadly, I will not. I am headed to the arts center to see the (second to) last performance by the current concert master.

Todd — 9:15

too bad… you realize that means the rogue leggings will drop

McQ — 9:17

absolutely. I am still not completely sold on the idea of doing “45 minute baron runs”. I would like to see all the content in the zone, but after about my third time through, I start to get bored. I really think that the WoW high end content is just for the uber-optimizing, power gamer crowd, and as I’ve said before, that’s really not my thing.

Todd — 9:19

the 45 minute baron run is for 1 quest. I understand that you are not keen on the repeated runs through an instance. I want the quest as I want the items that come from completing it. I try to think of it as a test of skill… can we complete it in the manner specified.

McQ — 9:21

yes, I get that. I believe what I was trying to say was a) I’m not particularly fussed about the gear I have, since what I’m already using works for everything I’ve done with it (and I’ll likely never get into a 40 man raid), and b) If I wanted a task of skill, I’d play Q3 Arena or Tetris. Having said that, I enjoy the social aspects of getting together on Thursdays.

Todd — 9:22

Well at least you are consistent

For some reason, the e-book community looks at Cory Doctorow’s use of free electronic versions of his books as loss leaders for his p-book versions as a success story.

As far as I can see, the fact that this actually works is proof that e-books are a failure. After all, if we were all regularly reading them, then giving away the electronic version would just be mean that Cory wasn’t getting paid. Since no one can make money of e-books anyway, of course you can give them away.

I solved my color noise problem.

The company called AKVIS makes a product called Noise Buster, which is a plug-in for Photoshop that removes color noise. The filtering it does is quite flexible, but it has a fully automatic mode as well. Here are a couple of images that provide an example of the results you can get by letting it choose the settings:

Before	After

Take a look at Vicky’s blue shirt and the wall behind her in particular. As you can see, the before shot is filled with random colored dots, while the after shot is completely acceptable (or at least is good enough for me).

I created a gallery of test photos with the new camera. Take a look at them here and tell me what you think. In the interest of making them vaguely more downloadable, I reduced them from 3072×2304 to 1280×1024, but that should still give you the right idea.

I’m not particularly happy with them, to tell you the truth. You would think having more megapixels would mean that the size of the dots of color noise would be smaller but that doesn’t actually seem to be the case. In all honesty, I think Deb’s 4 megapixel camera takes better shots.

Now I have to decide, whether I can live with that picture quality, or whether I should take it back to the store.

One other oddity: Take a look at the sheet music in this shot. Do you see the circular areas where it looks “smudged” on the right hand sheet? (There’s another one visible on the side of the grey filing cabinet.) Those areas are not in the original images! However, anything that displays or manipulates them on the Mac causes them to appear. If I use my PC to look at them instead, they’re gone. I can’t imagine what would cause that behavior, but it’s totally bogus.