I just got into Star Wars Galaxies for a few minutes. It’s been down a lot today, and downloading the patches took quite some time, too.

Character creation is nice. The character models can be morphed quite a bit (they don’t use actual bones to do that, but it looks pretty good anyhow). The character models have a nice resolution, there’s some bump mapping on them, too. They learned from our mistakes, and didn’t try to do character creation ingame 🙂

The tutorial explains the most important bits of the GUI rather well, and it’s part of a little sequence where I get to ill a terrorist. Nice, I’m totally by myself during the whole time. The camera controls are something you need to get used to. They’ve done something new with the controls, the character makes actual steps when turning around, so you don’t have those instant 180 turns that other games have, which is probably nice for the client-side prediction, too. No overshooting compensation. I wish I had a second client to see how they compensate for errors in the local prediction. Later.

The scanning of your clone data is directly taken out of Anarchy Online. They even call it insurance terminals, funny. There are a lot of things taken from AO, like the 10 buttons at the bottom right (which AO has in the top right).

Characters that you talk to have their conversation selections around their head. This is pretty irritating if you want to read them and the character moves his head as part of the idle animation (nice idle animations on everyone, btw). It keeps jittering by a few pixels all the time.

After the tutorial, I went to a starting city, met two other players, was happy to see that the character models stay the same. I’ll have to look at the technology some more when I’ve got more time.

Visuals are really nice. The screenshots look better than the game, unlike AO where the game always looked better than the screenshots. The physics are not impressive. There is very little that I can collide with. I can walk through people, tables, chairs, etc. and it seems like the only things that have a collision volume are walls and larger contructs (like the fountain I’m just standing next to). You can’t jump, which is probably a blessing for the level designers…

It’s probably not the best score in the world, but it’s good enough to serve as a test for posting images here. Resolutions of 320×240 are the new format for this site 🙂

You can get the game here

It’s taken quite a while. I was googling for weblog designs, and thought there’s probably be something I liked. It’s amazing how many ‘girlie’ designs there are, and how few that are jsut what I was looking for. Clean, fast to load, pleasing.

I think this one is it, though. The bloghaus design was orriginally created for blogger, but I messed with the pages long enough until it worked in nucleus, and here’s the result. I may be changing the links and some other bits, but for tonight, it’s as good as it gets.

The design a bit limiting when it comes to putting up pictures. I may widen it a bit to allow me to post my regular 400 pixel wide images. But I never liked the text next to the image style I used earlier, so maybe this is definitely for the better.

The blog server uses nucleus, which was very easy to install, and I’m extremely happy with it so far.

To update the blog without using the web forms, I found w.bloggar, an amazing client that understands all the current blog servers. Real nifty.

I also use the Winamplog plugin, to put the “Currently listening” information into the postings.

The webcounter is from goweb.de, and I’m taking it with me from the old site. It’s at 1108 now, which is quite a lot given I don’t write much interesting stuff.

The current visuals of this site are hideous, and I want to change them. Everyone who knwos my artistic talents is probably right in assuming that I’ll rip some other site off for ideas 🙂

I’m moving the blog again. The old is now at this location in case you’re looking for something specific. I might also just migrate all the data one day, when I’m really bored.