News from Great Castle Wilson

After work today, I went down to the local clone shop and ordered a new PC. I didn’t go for a high end CPU — I just couldn’t justify the price difference given the relatively small performance differential. What I ended up with was:

Motherboard	ASUS P5N32-SLI-DLX
CPU	Intel P4 D 950
RAM	2 x 1GB DDR2-667
Graphic Card	nVidia 7900-GTX 512M
Hard Drive	WD Raptor 74G (10K RPM)
Sound	Creative X-Fi Extreme Music

The CPU definitely isn’t the most high-end thing on the planet, but it should be a step up from what I currently have. The graphics card should also be significantly faster, so between the two of them I’m hoping this will be a satisfying upgrade. Mostly though, I am just looking for a replacement for my current, aging gaming machine. It has been through three previous upgrades, and it’s really starting to get tired.

In any case, over time, adding a second 7900, a second raptor (raid 0) and one of the new hyperthreaded dual core chips (or whatever succeeds them), will incrementally get me to close to double my performance yet again. Woot!

It should be ready in 7..10 days. Unfortunately, not quite in time for Oblivion, but close. That will be my first real test.

Some obvious bugs that definitely should not have made it past the beta:

• When you perform an action that causes a progress bar (like opening a lock), you can wait until the progress bar is filled, and you hear the lock click, but if you start moving then, the action still fails. You have to actually wait until you see the change occur on screen (i.e. the chest door opens). That’s just pathetic. Guys: If you are going to give us both visual and auditory feedback that the action is completed wait until it actually is.
• When you open a vendor window, if you click on “Sort by value”, then close it and open it again, “Sort by value” is still checked, but the items aren’t sorted. You actually have to uncheck it and then check it again to get them sorted.
• The gui sometimes forgets what state it’s in. Similar to the previous problem, but with much more drastic consequences, I can sometimes get the GUI into a state where it thinks I’m in auto-attack mode, for example, but I am not. This leads to wild thrashing of the keyboard, and then dying. You have got to fix this one soon. It alone will convince me to stop playing this game. Soon.
• When you zone into a new area. If there are a lot of toons nearby, it needs to send you the images of them. If you try to start moving before they all appear, you get this bizarre, speed-of-light fast warping effect for several seconds. To say that this breaks the immersiveness of the experience would be an understatement.

I’m sure I’ll think of more of these as soon as I stop writing. I’ll update this regularly with the latest things I find.

Not sure if this came through in my last post, but one of the things that I really like about DDO is the fact that your individual skill running the gui significantly impacts the outcome of a battle.

In a one on one battle, it’s possible to be out of range of the thing that is attacking when it swings at you, then dart in and attack it and dodge out of its way again — not guaranteed, but possible. You also need to maintain a defensive stance (i.e. block with the shift key) unless you are attacking, to raise your defence and reduce the chance of creatures hitting you with special attacks. Because of this, I have found that after a weekend of playing I can get through a battle with much less loss of HP than I could when I first started.

Now, at one point on the weekend, I was in a party of six and we were fighting as many as eight things at once (in the Butcher’s Way, in case you were wondering). It’s clear that there are similar lessons to learn when fighting in a group, but it will take more practice. The battles are quite frenetic.

Speaking of grouping, what happened to the rest of you who said you were going to try this game? Todd said he’s probably going to give this one a miss, so in retaliation I re-created Baiserdmort. I have to tell you being a rogue is tough in this game, although I did (once) manage to do an effective backstab and did 89HP with my 1D4 weapon. 🙂

So far at least, playing Gimlit the dwarf paladin is much easier. With about six hours of soloing, plus one good group, I managed to make it to level 2 (real level 2, not the first mini-ding). For comparison, Baiserdmort in 4 hours of play hasn’t even gotten to the first mini-ding yet.

Unfortunately, I’ll be at the arts center tonight, so I won’t be on. I would like to pick a day when we can all play though. I can do Monday or Wednesday easily, and could probably do any night on the weekend, with a bit more effort. Let me know.

I have been playing in the Dungeons & Dragons Online head start for the last couple of days, and I’ve got enough time in under my belt to be able to comment on it. For the attention deficit in the crowd, the capsule summary is: It’s a fun game, but it’s a generation behind in UI design.

I can’t stress enough how important the UI design issue is though. After WoW, players expect a certain set of capabilities. They just expect that the engine won’t get in the way. Are you listening, Turbine? These things have to get fixed or you haven’t got a prayer:

• Make a sound when you take damage from falling. I actually couldn’t figure out why my hit points kept randomly going down, until I realized that jumping off a stack of boxes can hurt you. And honestly, if you’re going to make it that easy to kill yourself by jumping off of something, why not make it a little harder for me to accidentally do the action that causes it, eh?
• On a related note: Make all feedback more obvious. In a game where you actually require some skill/coordination to drive the UI, you have to make it more obvious when you are doing the right thing.
• Of course, that would have made combat training easier, but even given that, you need a better combat training tutorial. I went through the battles with the three golumns about five times before I even started to understand the mechanics — I don’t actually think I’ve got it yet.
• Don’t allow me to select my character by clicking on him. I have died several times because I wanted to select a particular enemy target that happened to just be standing directly in front of me. If you do think that selecting yourself on screen is important, at least make it option. I’ve played games that have it, and games that don’t. The ones that don’t work better. Trust me.
• Don’t invent new keybindings when the entire MMO community knows the existing vernacular. You want to know what my first grouping experience was like in DDO? Someone sent me a tell that said “Do you want to join up?”, so (of course) I hit the “R” key to reply “yes”, but instead I (auto-)ran off the doc I was standing on and killed myself. “nm”, said the person who asked to group.
• The inventory screen! Bah! It’s horrible. No auto-sorting, things disappear out of slots and get filled in with other stuff so you can never find the item you just picked up (because the icons are the size of pinheads even when playing at (only) 1280×1024). You can’t even figure out whether an item is worth using unless you select it, then expand the focus gem (normally hidden because it takes up too much screen real-estate), then click on the magnifying glass. Did it not occur to you to put this on a hover? If you want to see what you should have done, take a look at the auction interface in WoW.
• You know all those NPCs that take random loot drops and give you something in return (like the mushroom collectors)? Did you really think making me click through every option and have them say “You’re making me angry” was a useful UI? It’s slow and it breaks immersion badly. How about just only giving me the options that I actually have the items for? Wouldn’t that have made more sense?
• For God’s sake, give me a macro capability. I’m not asking for much, I just want to be able to /sit by hitting the X key. (Actually, I’m still hoping that this capability is in the game, and I just missed it — If this game doesn’t come with a decent manual, I’m going to be really pissed.)
• And, please please please, allow me to make all the on screen windows semi-transparent (and allow me to drag them partially of screen). I spend half my time with about 1/3 of the entire screen covered with windows. I feel like I’m looking through a key hole.

Anyway, that’s enough of a rant for now. I’m sure I’ll think of other things as time goes on. Stay tuned.

Update: Can someone explain to me where in “real” Dungeons & Dragons they have that unbelievably outdated game mechanic: Smashing Barrels. As a lawful good paladin, why would I smash every barrel in some poor guys house? Can you tell? Why?

Update 2: Any of you have this experience yet: get attacked by two creatures; randomly tumble around attempting to not get hit; get wedged on the geometry; try to get unstuck by jumping; not notice for a couple of seconds you are no longer attacking because jumping blew away your target; die. Turbine: On the list of absolutely must do items, please add “option to auto-target something that is attacking me”.

Note: Despite everything I said above, I’m actually enjoying this game so far, at least in part because it isn’t anything like WoW. If you want to chat with me, look for Gimlit on the Mabar server. Good hunting!

I’m looking at putting together a new gaming machine. In an effort to cut costs, I’m going to probably just put my venerable 6800 Ultra OC in the machine, at least until I can save up some money for something better (Mmmm… X1900 XTX). I can live with that for now; what I really want is a CPU upgrade.

I have been looking at the best AMD and Intel dual core chips, which are the FX-60 and the P4 D EE respectively. Both of these are worth a ludicrous amount of money: somewhere in the $1300 to $1400 range. Holy sizzling money-sinks Batman! You could buy a whole machine for that price. It also looks like the socket form factors they are using are both approaching the end of their lifespans, so next upgrade would also have to include a mo-bo.

The thing is, I’m already running a P4 3.2GHz HT (800MHz FSB). This honestly isn’t that slow a machine, so it will take something serious to see an obvious performance win. I’m currently thinking the FX-60 is the way to go, but I’m open to anybody’s suggestions.

I am also going for a better case/cooling system + a 10K RPM Raptor HD. Unfortunately, RAID 0 will have to wait until I can afford a second one.

The good news is that I’ll have quite a strong upgrade path based on this system: up to 2 high end graphics cards plus a second drive in RAID 0 will almost certainly provide yet another performance boost next year.

We got an Intel iMac at work, and I have to say it is fast. Apps start quickly (one dock icon bounce to get Safari running) and are joyously responsive. Eclipse looks great on it!

Of course, the reason why the apps appear fast is that they were slow before. That’s the joy of developing software on a slow platform: If it’s usable on the G4, it will scream on the new boxes. (Anybody remember the transition from 68K to Power?)

Unfortunately, the downside of this is that developers will now start writing applications that are just “usable” on an Intel Mac, meaning that they will be brutally slow on my G4 laptop. Oh well. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Both nights went well for Divertimento. Personally, I thought Friday night was a little tighter over all, but I had people come up to me both nights and say that they thought the orchestra sounded the best ever. This included one person who said they’d been coming for 19 years.

Now we have to start seriously working on the program for the next concert, which is definitely harder material.

Thanks to all who attended, and I hope you had fun.

Just a reminder that the spring Divertimento “pops” concerts are tomorrow and Saturday at 8pm. The program is:

The Friday concert is at Rideau Park United Church, 2203 Alta Vista Drive. The Saturday concert is at L’Église St-Thomas-d’Aquin, 1244 Kilborn Ave. I haven’t got any tickets to sell, but they will be available at the door:

Adults: $10.00
Students/Seniors: $8.00
Children under 13: $5.00

I was up at 5am this morning to get to the airport in time to get through airport security before my flight left. Somehow in the process of taking everything you own and putting it in little grey boxes to go through the scanner, I missed the PDA in my pocket, so when it set off the security station they were (of course) inordinately interested in why I had tried to get through without getting it scanned (doh!). At which point, they told me to take off my belt, shoes, etc. — anybody who travels to the US now, knows the drill.

I did finally get through the checkpoint, but my Bluetooth GPS unit fell out of my coat when I was taking it off and smashed on the cement floor. I put it back together, and it appeared to be communicating with my PDA, but it couldn’t see any satelites (even standing at a window) which leads me to believe it’s busted. More testing required.

The flight was cramped but uneventful, which is about the best you can hope for now. I went directly from the airport to work, but didn’t stay for very long. I needed to come home and nap long enough to be awake at the orchestra dress rehearsal tonight.

I got about an hour of sleep in before Dennis called home to say that his wallet had been lost, and just under 5 more minutes before he called again to say it had been found. At that point, I gave up on the napping idea.

The good news is that I’m back at home again, but man, I hate travelling!