I was actually very much considering on getting headphones, but having been repeatedly exposed to the eargasmic sound waves of my friend's Genelecs, I had no choice.
So, on one hazy afternoon Lannukka headed to Iisalmi. Prices had been negotiated earlier, so only a little while later we headed back, with a 7050B for Pilkki and two 8040As for me.
Unboxing, cabling, Zephyr. Oh, and photos.
Guild Wars 2 Public Beta: Observations
First of all: great job ANet, it only took few hours to get things working. It took close to 24 hours from Blizzard to get D3 Open Beta in any kind of working order :D
Overall the game seems to function fairly well, but there is some minor things I want to note.
- When opening map while holding RMB, character can't be steered.
- When using melee attacks, one must manually to move to range.
- Dynamic events don't change the world very much, all is a lie :(
- Dynamic events seems to have minimum difficulty, one or two players will have a hard time completing one.
- Looting requires a) navigating to corpse b) interacting with it c) claiming items, too long a chain.
- The there was about eight bugs I reported, but they are not included in this list.
But then there also is some bigger concerns
- Mobs start to regenerate far too fast, pull little too far and they get full health almost immediately.
- Leveling progression is slower than that of enemies, making fights harder and harder, and then there will be level grinding..
- I want Energy back to the game, this is just spam-fest now!
- There is not too much freedom on skill selection. In original Guild Wars I could fill my bar with heals, for example, but here I can only select one. The unchangeable skill selection for weapons also was bit of a let down. Of course one could change weapon, but I want to use that weapon differently.
But there was some great things, too.
- Dynamic events, at least when experiencing them the first time, they were just great. People would just pour in and everyone would just really want to beat the bad guys or whatever.
- New quest system. Yes, it is the same old 'Kill ten rats and/or do x', but no explicit quest accepting/turning in procedure, gives more fluidity for everything.
- And about fluids, water is an interesting element, no longer a barrier.
- Reformed combat. Moving while casting and attacking really gives a new dimension for combat and exploration.
A smooth start for the first Guild Wars 2 Public Beta, NOT! And diary!
The beta was supposed to start at 22 o’clock, but when I tried to log in about 21:45, I got in after a few tries !!1! Even managed to make a nice Norn Ranger and watch the opening cinematic, but then I was greeted by a black screen at the end of the opening cinematic and hung there… And now I can’t get back in, forums are down and there is talks about crashed servers. Well, so far this still has gone better than D3 open beta. Really hoping I get to play the game today.
22:57: Managed to get to character selection screen for a brief time, but all controls became unresponsive, so I logged out, again.
23:06: Third time in, failed to get to game world, and UI locked again.
23:54: Finally managed to log in, same error and lockup. Went to sleep.
-- Saturday begins
3:30: Woke up, checked whether the game works, it worked. Went back to sleep.
4:30: Couldn't sleep, started gaming. All is well.
5:46: Got kicked out. Got back immediately. Seems that my progress was rollbacked about five minutes..
6:16: Got kicked out, couldn't get in right away. I hear there's some maintenance.
6:50: It's on!
14:30: I was going to switch characters, but error messages greeted me then and every time after character selection. Maybe I should take this moment to eat something.
15:15: Servers allowed me to continue gaming.
19:00: Felt sleepy, wen't for a nap.
20:40: OK, let's continue.
22:45: Got kicked out without so much of an error message.
-- Sunday begins
00:45: It's on, finally!
00:55: Or not.. no error once again..
05:55: How about some sleep now? Not tired yet, but bad things might happen without sleep. Well, at least I played 18 hours and 30 minutes with the last sleep. Pity that beta end Monday at 09:00, and I have normal things to do then, so can't play too this following night.
14:10: It's on!
00:28: First ever crash for me.
01:55: Oh well.. have to get up fairly early in the morning, so this will have to do... 30 hours(exactly) is better than nothing.
07:55: Before going to sleep I heard there would a ending event, so had to wake up to play it. Turns out it only begun when the beta was supposed to end. Anyway, it was awesome! I even have few videos in youtube about Champion Bloodthirsty Black Moas.
09:03: Bam! Login screen without error message, I'm getting used to this. Pity this was the last time this would happen in a long time, as the BETA IS OVER! Playtime: 32 hours 8 minutes.The beta was supposed to start at 22 o’clock, but when I tried to log in about 21:45, I got in after a few tries !!1! Even managed to make a nice Norn Ranger and watch the opening cinematic, but then I was greeted by a black screen at the end of the opening cinematic and hung there… And now I can’t get back in, forums are down and there is talks about crashed servers. Well, so far this still has gone better than D3 open beta.
Really hoping I get to play the game today.
22:57: Managed to get to character selection screen for a brief time, but all controls became unresponsive, so I logged out, again.
23:06: Third time in, failed to get to game world, and UI locked again.
23:54: Finally managed to log in, same error and lockup. Went to sleep.
-- Saturday begins
3:30: Woke up, checked whether the game works, it worked. Went back to sleep.
4:30: Couldn't sleep, started gaming. All is well.
5:46: Got kicked out. Got back immediately. Seems that my progress was rollbacked about five minutes..
6:16: Got kicked out, couldn't get in right away. I hear there's some maintenance.
6:50: It's on!
14:30: I was going to switch characters, but error messages greeted me then and every time after character selection. Maybe I should take this moment to eat something.
15:15: Servers allowed me to continue gaming.
19:00: Felt sleepy, wen't for a nap.
20:40: OK, let's continue.
22:45: Got kicked out without so much of an error message.
-- Sunday begins
00:45: It's on, finally!
00:55: Or not.. no error once again..
05:55: How about some sleep now? Not tired yet, but bad things might happen without sleep. Well, at least I played 18 hours and 30 minutes with the last sleep. Pity that beta end Monday at 09:00, and I have normal things to do then, so can't play too this following night.
14:10: It's on!
-- Monday begins
00:28: First ever crash for me.
01:55: Oh well.. have to get up fairly early in the morning, so this will have to do... 30 hours(exactly) is better than nothing.
07:55: Before going to sleep I heard there would a ending event, so had to wake up to play it. Turns out it only begun when the beta was supposed to end. Anyway, it was awesome! I even have few videos in youtube about Champion Bloodthirsty Black Moas.
09:03: Bam! Login screen without error message, I'm getting used to this. Pity this was the last time this would happen in a long time, as the BETA IS OVER! Playtime: 32 hours 8 minutes.
In anticipation of next week’s Guild Wars 2 Public Beta
I’ve had high hopes for GW2 even before it was announced, and finally I’ll get a chance to try it out personally! Needless to say, I’m getting fairly exited here.
Or that would be the case had I not seen videos of previous closed beta. I’m having serious doubts on the fact they removed Energy from the game. That means that for most of the classes there is only a single resource to manage(recharge). Without firsthand playing experience I am having huge difficulties believing that recharge and timing alone give as much of a challenge and joy as they did in Guild Wars 1 which also had Energy.
And what I have gathered from videos and other sources, I feel that Guild Wars 2 has been dumbed down in other areas, too. Take the Mesmers, for example. They’ve been hugely shown in the media, but I haven’t seen them doing much shutdowning. Ok, Izzy mentioned that interrupts for example were given a much smaller role than in GW1 due to latency issues, but.. They worked just fine in GW1, don’t change that. They add depth to the game and encourage varying casting order and positioning away from the interrupter. On the other hand they allow skilled players to really dominate their enemies if they know what they are doing, rewarding expertise.
But that gets us to another key aspect: positioning. The dev team has been pretty exited about it’s importance and told that it would have a huge impact on battles. I’m not sure if they have been making it an even bigger mechanic as time has passed, but earlier they were very careful not to introduce [cheap] skills that affect position or movement, but recently I’ve seen more skills doing just that. It will be interesting to see what is the reality here.
Moving on to bigger stuff: the first M in MMO. Guild Wars 1 can be said to be only a MO, but now that Guild Wars 2 is here it gets Massive. The devs have faced an enormous challenge in transforming GW1 to a massively playable state. I have played some tiny amounts of WoW, and was quite pleased with the massive aspect in it, world felt like a much more lively place when another player could be seen doing the same things as you were etc etc. The massive aspect is one of the biggest things I am looking forward to experiencing, but GW1 mechanics might have difficulty directly translating to a scale like this. There lies the danger of dumbing everything down to a point where old players start to feel uncomfortable about the core mechanics. Widest possible audience is sometimes not what you want.
But will Guild Wars 2 be Guild Wars 2, or just a MMO set in Guild Wars universe? If you ask me, the game mechanics are almost as important as story and setting. Next week will answer so many questions.
Still waiting for Raspberry Pi
This wait is killing me. All I want is a nice little computer running quietly on my desk/ceiling/wall/whatever with all kinds of specialized sw/hw.
- I want my very own shell.
- I want a portable thin client.
- I want remote controlled lighting.
- I want Nginx and Stackless Python.
- I want a battery backup using 18650s or capacitors.
- I want to use those temperature sensors I have in my drawer!
But as far as I know my luck, there'll be some kind of obstacle preventing me from acquiring this wonderful piece of equipment, or at least greatly hinder my plans. Still missing a video adapter, a quality power source and a memory card. Oh, and my network infrastructure is bit lacking, too.. but on that some other post.
Of the importance of simplified web page system
The last few months I've been more or less actively doing site&stuff for lumicraft.fi, I've realized that the way the site can be edited has a huge impact on the amount of edits one does. (sürprise..)
Back in dea.fi and lannukka.fi for example, LCS is being used, and they are quite 'repulsive' to edit. First logging in and then using that anemic, but still syntax hilighted text area to do the edit embedded HTML(not the whole page, only the content area) and then publish the edit and have the revision show up in the changelog. But what if you made a typo? New edit, new changelog entry :(
But on lumicraft I went back to a simpler system, there's just a directory containing normal text files with WikiCreole inside. Beautiful and fast-to-type syntax. Nothing fancy required. Just edit the file and voilà!
Of course I could have continued to just use HTML, then it would have been only a matter of include(), but seems I can't get around experimenting :p
Ok, I must admit. There is no way to keep track of changes to see how the site has evolved. No way to notify people that an edit has been made. Of course a cronjob could be made to diff the files etc, but it's just kludgy. Although a daemon came to my mind, listening to file change events and acting appropriately. Might actually work, but still bit of a kludge.
But the point: as transparency increases in editing, so does productivity.
Global/Finnish game jam aftermath, Sommerkopter
Well, that was interesting. As you might know, the event was about writing a game in 48 hours. I must say that it is not too much.
I was in a team consisting of me and five older students. Felt bit out of my league, considering we had decided to use C++, a language I had only a little experience in.
But everything exploded better than exceptions! This Game Jam was first real coding project for me involving other developers, and I learned much about working as a team. First of all, it was incredible to be able to work with like-minded people. People who actually also knew how to code, and with this particular language even better than me. When coding my part of the game(terrain generation), there was few particular challenges with memory management and syntax, but now I could verbally ask for help! I might not have been very productive, but at least learned a lot.
And what was wildly different from coding by myself, I could actually concentrate on only part of the project. No need to code everything by myself. Not even the graphics, those were made by the two 'highly skilled' artists in our team.
But actually, in the end there was only two other people in our team coding. Other two were on the graphics dept and one had to fight with our version control system for the whole weekend. But those two other coders, they made the bulk of the code needed to make this happen, I thank thee.
But I thank the whole team also, we all made this weekend amazing. I had great fun brainstorming and socializing with you (me socializing, o.o). And we actually created something very nice, didn't we? Something that actually might appear again in the future. (winkwink)
So I present you Sommerkopter: Global Game Jam project page and a gameplay video! A game where your objective will be flying logs from hills to a collection area, with a helicopter. Heli-logging at it's best.
I was in a team consisting of me and five older students. Felt bit out of my league, considering we had decided to use C++, a language I had only a little experience in.
But everything exploded better than exceptions! This Game Jam was first real coding project for me involving other developers, and I learned much about working as a team. First of all, it was incredible to be able to work with like-minded people. People who actually also knew how to code, and with this particular language even better than me. When coding my part of the game(terrain generation), there was few particular challenges with memory management and syntax, but now I could verbally ask for help! I might not have been very productive, but at least learned a lot.
And what was wildly different from coding by myself, I could actually concentrate on only part of the project. No need to code everything by myself. Not even the graphics, those were made by the two 'highly skilled' artists in our team.
But actually, in the end there was only two other people in our team coding. Other two were on the graphics dept and one had to fight with our version control system for the whole weekend. But those two other coders, they made the bulk of the code needed to make this happen, I thank thee.
But I thank the whole team also, we all made this weekend amazing. I had great fun brainstorming and socializing with you (me socializing, o.o). And we actually created something very nice, didn't we? Something that actually might appear again in the future. (winkwink)
So I present you Sommerkopter: Global Game Jam project page and a gameplay video! A game where your objective will be flying logs from hills to a collection area, with a helicopter. Heli-logging at it's best.
And for the future: if you, the reader, have a chance to participate next year, please help yourself and do so. It will be fun.
Imported texts from an Old blog
Stumbled upon some blog texts I had written during 2006-2007 to a custom blogging-software. Decided to import them here. Mostly Finnish texts, sorry. Just couldn't let them lie forgotten. Decided not to import comments, if that is even possible. Although there was more of them than here..
But it was bit of a fight, had to figure out the format used by blogger(it is atom extended with some custom fields) and generate that kind of file from my flatfile-db. Had to copy-paste attributes to feed, add generator-tag and the category kind#post -element to entries. That did it, and blogger imported my XML without a hitch.
Message from the distant land of real life
While we're on it, let's publish another one, shall we.
I moved to Lappeenranta about a month ago to begin my studies of Computer Science in Lappeenranta University of Technology, lut. A beautiful and lively city this is, at least at summer. Pity it's either 7km of walking or 3.40€ by bus per side to get to the city center.
The University is near, about 1.5km, only five minutes by bike. It's a nice, big building complex that has expanded as years have gone by. Everything can be accessed without going outside, including a nice library, couple of restaurants/lunchplaces, a cafeteria, guild hall(cluser.fi) and of course all auditoriums and labs(for example, room full of remotely accessible i7-2600, 8GB desktops).
And the building is just amazing, especially the newer areas sculpted with concrete, iron and glass. Just stunning, you standing there, inside in your warm hi-tech fortress and wild nature is just few inches away on the other side of the glass(fyi, I've lived surrounded by nature my whole life). It must be experienced, but still I really should snap some photos someday.
An apartment was also required, so one was acquired. Well ok, it's in an apartment building, and shared with another person, but still quite ok. Moving also meant gathering a s***load of more or less useful stuff. Tried to document it all, but had to stop halfway through, just couldn't keep up with every single item. This move all also meant I had to learn how to live by myself; having to cook, clean and do laundry, all while studying. As hard as it is to confess, conscription really made it all easier(but it itself was far from easy.. just a reminder). Nevertheless, I assure that time available to hobbies has not diminished, or at least not yet.
Studying is quite ok, although bit hard at first getting used to again, having had break of about 1.5 years. Especially homework is a thing that keeps bugging me. Oh, and of course the math course has resulted in fair bit of cursing. One third of course done, and already we've gone through three years worth of extended gymnasium mathematics..
And this all reminded me how bad my English actually is..
Quick look at Windows 8
Installed Windows 8 Developer Preview to a VM few hours ago, what follows is a cluttered list of visual observations. Sorry, did my best. Read it if you still want.
- Integrates your user account to Windows live account by default.
- Task manager has undergone some major changes. Sure it's more sleek, but I kind of miss the old one..
- Same applies to most default applications. Everything has been stripped down in search of cleaner UI. Like metro, too clean.
- Sending files to trash doesn't need a confirmation. Some other things have also been streamlined, can't remember now.
- Components like .NET framework are installed by a wizard.
- Much like Windows 7, at least more than 7 was like Vista.
- UI suddenly lost all roundings with the new metro look.
- Everything is so rectangular, clean, but maybe too clean.
- Gadgets are by default not enabled in favor of metro.
- Metro applications can't be illegitimately closed! They end up cluttering alt-tab list.
- Things like control panel are really hard to find at first.
- Many things really are touch-centric. Mouse support on some of them is broken.
- Usability is, well.. either good or bad.
- Main screen looks great, nice thing to peek and see all little bits of information.
- Individual apps(or whatever) are 'too fullscreen' and lack small features that could be found on all mouse/keyboard driven apps.
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