Key Our Cars

Just a quick note to say I’m voting with my wallet on this one and refusing to buy Bioshock 2.  Three different DRM systems are installed to get this thing to work properly.  I’m appalled. Until I get the stupidity to set up a game machine that’s JUST a game machine that I can reghost after every game to start over clean I’m not installing something that loads down my WORKING machine with this much crap.

In a year or so if they remove the DRM (and the price drops subsequently) I may consider it.

I have a ‘friend’ who bought Bioshock Uno and didn’t even unwrap it and instead downloaded a cracked version to avoid this bullshit.  My ‘friend’ refuses now to continue to support and pander to this kind of thinking.

<rant off>

This a dev map of an idea for a Left 4 Dead ‘movie’ I’m doodling with.  A movie as defined in L4D terms is simply a number of levels loosely tied together with a fitting climax at the end of a horde or three of infected (they’re not undead so zombies isn’t a great term although technically it does work by general definition).

Anyway here’s a video of a rough draft.  I’m still working on the parking garage which will be the new ending with an appropriate crescendo moment.  I ran into a limitation of Source engine (yet again) and now I have to model a lot of it as props rather than as brush work.  Which means I have to beat my head against XSI (I’m a Studio Max / Lightwave 3d modeler ever since Studio 4d for DOS and the Video Toaster 1.0). Â  I’ve used a lot of other 3d apps, Silver, Sculpt 4D, Imagine, Maya but I never did like SoftImage or Soft ih mawghj as seems to be the l33t way to pronounce it.  I didn’t know it was french based  (sacasm alert) so I’m not familiar with it.  It took me a couple of hours to get a wall with pillers, openings and slants modeled and textured in it as a result and then another hour and a half to get it compiled and in game because there is a shit load of misleading and simply wrong information out there on the compiling process.  But eventually I got it working and now that I’ve worked out the process the next one might take 5 minutes to compile and get in game.

Why you ask am I forcing myself to use XSI instead of my beloved Max when there are perfectly good export tools for Max that are every bit as good as the so called official mod tool?  Simple, learning new things stimulates the growth of neurons in your brain and these new neurons can take over when the old ancient ones are beginning to fail. Â  Alhzheimer’s scares me.

Click the video above after it starts to play and you can go to the actual youtube site and watch it in hd as well.

Image Credits

Well I’ve got nothing to offer you other than random musings and ramblings. Â  The forums have dried up on me, there’s very little activity on Enworld and very few posts worth reading on Gleemax (official forums) much less actually recording for posterity here.

One thing that some people are doing is ‘speeding’ up game play.  This has taken a slim variety of paths but it seems to fall into the allowing players to use their encounter powers more than once per encounter and their dailies more than once per day.  Getting rid of or altering healing surges is another prime candidate for change or using them as currency to allow more frequent usage of their powers.

One thing that struck me as interesting is one group’s removing the long rest and instead make their powers ‘episodic’.  You get what you get at the start of the gaming session and you don’t get more until the start of the next one.  BUT they’re also doing average damage (end result is the same but it does remove a great source of low and high points to me) and they’re making Dailies once per encounter, Encounters at-will. Â  They seem to be having fun with it but the DM admits his group is a bit on the power gamey side.

I think, now that I bother to think about it, that most of the people for whom ‘spamming the same two attacks at-will) is lame, lame, lame are the ones who’s idea of RPG’s are MMOG’s.  Anyone brought up old school where every combat round was, except for the mage and to very lesser extent the cleric, *roll d20 and see if I hit* and just repeat that for however many attacks they got.  The cleric was typically, roll a d20 to hit maybe, run around and cast Cure [blank] Wounds primarily. Â  To us actually having two different attacks on top of the basic attack which is all anyone ever used to get triples our options.

If you’re a fan of Zombies, computer games and first person shooters then Left 4 Dead can’t be recommended enough.  And you can get it from Amazon right now for only $46 which is a small bargain with free shipping.  Of course you could get it from Steam for $49 and not have to pay shipping either or taxes or wait for it to show up in the mail.

If you have a friend or two then I’d recommend getting your own dedicated server.  They’re $12 a month most places and you’re gaurenteed low latency, availability and the like.  Split that 4 ways and you’re only paying $3 a month each.  Unless you have a horse of a machine and a lot of outbound bandwidth trying to run a listen server on your desktop while you play is going to suck for anyone trying to connect, not to mention going to the trouble of getting the right ports forwarded through your router and unblocked at  your local firewall etc.  Heck for $12 I’d rent my own personal server if we didn’t already have a group one.

I’ve been working on hacking L4D mapping out while we wait, impatiently, for the real mapping tools to be released and have working maps but they’re not quite ‘there’ yet.  The navigation tools aren’t working so you can’t build your navigation areas quite properly.

Any maps/campaigns I do I’ll post here for your bemusement as well.

The car picture is an example of the 67 mustang I’ve got and working on restoring.  It’s a slow process, I’m spreading out the expenses of parts over the long haul and the waterfall costs never seem to stop.  To run a set of air tools and possibly repaint the car back to it’s original color is going to need a good sized air compressor.  That’s going to require a 220 volt circuit in the garage.  That’s going to require a new sub panel off the main panel and wire run from pretty much as far a point in the house as you can get.  The panel is on the diagonally opposite side of the house from where the outlets would be needed. Â  Of course a 220 would also be needed for a decent mig welder.  So it’s always one thing after another.

This is how I envisioned it after a little thought being disapointed in the ‘stands on their own’ feeling each movie had. (and aside from money/time/resources to get the game out for the 2008 holiday season this might be why we’re left to envision, in order to make our own story out of it)…

Prologue – A extremely communicable version of rabies is let loose in the world’s airports, the initial form has a 6-10 day incubation and is airborne.  Thanks to the very small world we have now with international travel this disease spreads across the globe like wildfire.  It mutates as it spreads to become more contagious and with a shorter incubation period.

0.5% of humanity is naturally immune to virus but not the swarms of rampaging raging infected that now infest every city, town and village.

No Mercy – Our four survivors have been trying to ‘wait it out’ in the city but the infected aren’t dying off like they’d hoped from thirst and starvation and now they’re mutating into other [I][B]things[/B][/I]. Â  This is not good.  Not good at all.  The chopper flies past entreating any survivors to head to Mercy hospital.  Our quad fights it way to the hospital and escapes in the chopper.  Unfortunately the pilot has the disease and isn’t immune.  He rapidly worsens but manages to bring the chopper down on a rooftop near the edge of the city.

Dead Air – Our quad kills the pilot and while wondering what the hell is next sees the airplane flying past.  Okay, time to head to the airport on the edge of town!  They make it there, get the plane fueled up and head out.  Unfortunately, yet again, in 10 minutes you can’t completely fuel a plane and all the airports are overrun anyway so the pilot makes an emergency landing on a highway dying in the crash.

Death Toll – Our fearless quad hikes up the highway coming across a small town.  They fight through the town and find a dock where they’re picked up by a boat to chug away down the river.  Gas is a problem and eventually they run out and after drifting for two days end up beached on a sand bar in rural America.  After hearing their stories about how everyone dies around them, the pilot decides he doesn’t want to be their next redshirt and heads off on his own.

Blood Harvest – Our group heads inland in search of supplies and comes across the train tracks and travels along it knowing most of America’s goods are shipped by rail, hoping to come across a boxcar full of Hungry Man meals and Jello Brand Pudding Pops (TM).  They find more infected and a corn field watered in blood.  It’s obviously they’re not going to take up a career as farmers with infected for neighbors but are rescued yet again and drive off in a armored personnel carrier even further into outback where they eventually hole up in a fully stocked ‘oh those crazy survivalist nut’s bought an abandoned missile silo, who’s laughing now’ complex along with other survivors which has become known as Vault 101 in the area.

Well the demo has been short but very sweet.  Single player it’s marginally better than similar games, the frenetic, frantic times when a zombie horde is rushing you in some ways feels a lot like certain levels of Serious Sam, especially the one where you get locked in a large football stadium sized walled courtyard and crap just keeps on a comin at you and it becomes a game of nothing more than backpeddling.

Which brings up a pet peeve of mine, in FPS’s a character can run just as fast backwards as forward without any issues at all.  I’d love to see one where you can’t do that, where you’re slower and you have a chance to stumble and fall. Â  Assuming they release the SDK for Left 4 Dead I may get VS installed again and see what I can do there.

People have already started trying other maps in the demo and they work to a certain point.  The map is filled with zombies but unless the map has nav points they don’t move.  So the posted claims about the zombies being able to path and move and such don’t seem to jibe with reality.  They still use the same breadcrumb navigation system of the other source engines.

There have been a huge outcry over the craptastic console based matching system they attempted to force up on the PC world but luckily they left the old server browser system in the code, all articles to the contrary, no that wasn’t patched back in, it was left in and there from the start, it just took people awhile to figure out the console commands to bring it down.

The game is a hellish blast with friends on a private server on difficulty 4 (Expert / Impossible). Â  Anything lower than that and it’s a cakewalk.

I’m guessing the PC difficulties mimic the console difficulties and that’s a bad thing.  What’s hard on a console because of the controller isn’t on a PC. Â  What I want to see is the ability to dial in the damage the regular zombies do, their total health, and the amount of friendly fire damage a person takes on a hit of said friendly fire.  I don’t like blanket difficulties in this manner.

I’m looking forward to mapping for this thing also.  HL engines have always been my favorite games to map for because unlike something like BF2 or other FPS’s the automatic download from the server or server pointer means other people actually get to see your maps.

Peace and if you hear a thundering horde of infected footsteps heading your way, I highly advise you to get your back in a doorway and your shotgun ready.

Image Credits

Well with the new system, the new changes and the new newness of it all I’ve decided to come up with some changes to my gaming table. I stopped by Lowe’s this morning and picked up a sheet of Lexan plastic 3′ x 6′ and then brought it home to find it’s roughly 1/2″ too wide and about 6′ too long to fit in the inset in my gaming table.

So several scores down the length of it using my largest metal ruler (6′) I snapped off the excess.  It was pretty clean but I ran the random orbit sander down the edges to ensure there’s no pointy bits that are going to be breaking off.  Although given the insetness of the sheet it’s not a major issue but using a finger to pry it up could get nasty.

So now I’ve got a piece of clear plastic to fit in my well on my gaming table and then I realize black grid on black pokercloth isn’t going to work well.  So another trip out and I get some gray matte board.  I’m going to use some sponge technique’s to ‘roughen’ it up so it looks like stone.  Geeky eh?

Then I’m going to use metallic pen markers to draw a grid on the underside of the plastic.  So the grid will sit under the part where I’ll be drawing maps.

And the point to this all?  I can now put cheet sheets, character sheets and all that under the map, you can read it through the map and yet I can draw over the sheets to map.

Well I picked up Age of Conan over the weekend and started playing that.

The good, the combat is different although ‘twitchy’ and requires the dexerity of a three armed monkey, the graphics are good, it has naked boobs in it along with decaptitations an in general so far has had a very smooth launch.  Granted I haven’t yet tried a full open retail session yet so that might change.

The bad, it requires the dexterity of a three armed monkey, you can only have eight total characters across all servers and they have 12 classes.

We’re on a RP-PVP server and the gankfests so far have been there but not horrible yet but then again I think most people are just trying to level so they can get high enough to come back and gankfest people on.  I don’t get it myself, I enjoy PVP more than most but jumping someone 10 levels lower or after they’re 3/4 dead from fighting a mob all with the razor thin rationalization of “I’m roleplaying a psychotic killer.” just really makes me wonder about society.  Remove the threat of penalty and consquences and all that.  If you want more information on that just google it, smarter folks than me have done master thesis on such behaviours, all I know is that it sucks.

Anyway, I wouldn’t say I’m orgasmic like some MMOG hoppin’ monkeys tend to get but it’s so far a fairly stable, so so polished game at a time when I haven’t played a MMOG for about 18 months now so it’s mildly entertaining.

Your Mileage May Vary of course.