Shadowlands expectations high

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Shadowlands Box Picture

It looks like Shadowlands is going to sell well. The pre-orders at least look promising, and the game has been in the top 5 at Electronics Boutique for four weeks straight.

Based on an idea I had early this year, players that pre-order the game will get a special appartment in Jobe. Those are really cool party places with a view over the floating city, bathtub, a lounge, bedroom and kitchen – a real appartment, unlike the shoeboxes that players in Omni 1 or Tir call home.

Although my involvement in Shadowlands has been pretty small (since I work on new products now), there’s still some code of mine in there, and I’m emotionally involved with Anarchy Online – I really want to see Shadowlands get off to a good start. It’s got a lot of great potential, and the new locations are awe-inspiring, and when they’re done, they’ll hopefully be packed with action.

Jobe appartments

Beerdrinkers and Hellraisers

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Went to see ZZ Top in concert at Rockefeller last night. We were standing 3 meters from the stage, I had a great view, and Morten says his ears are still ringing today. It is probably the most intimate concert on the tour, since Rockefeller is a really small place to begin with, and it looks like they had lots of fun playing in front of such a small audience. The crowd was wild, they didn’t need any warming up at all, and ZZ Top played a nice mix of tunes mostly from Deguello and Tres Hombres, both rock and blues.

If you ever get a chance to see them in concert, do. Definitely worth seeing. And check out the Mescalero album when it comes out. Review from oslopuls.no is here.

lua bindings for eressea

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I’ve always wanted to have a scripting language in Eressea, for all kinds of reasons. The GM tool could really do with a console, for example. And monsters could be scripted without having to change the C code every time. Eressea is really pretty backwards in terms of technology.

So today, I made the old C code C++-clean (added a lot of extern “C” around them), and made lua bindings with luabind and I’m exposing a subset of the region and unit classes to lua. First script (apart from Hello world) listed all the regions by name and coordinates, it’s not much, but it’s a start.

It was actually easier to write small C++ wrapper functions (especially a wrapper template for the Eressea linked lists) and then use luabind (which is a C++ library) than to export the C structures directly though lua’s API. I really like luabind. I found 2 small bugs while I was working on this, but if they haven’t been fixed already, I’m sure they will be soon. The iterator support is rather fresh, after all.

Currently reading: Good Omens

~ Enno ~ 1 Comment

I’m re-reading Good Omens right now. I was actually looking for Neverwhere, but our local bookstore did not have it i stock. So I got the only Neil Gaiman book they had, even though I already knew it. It’s hilarious.

Short plot summary: Armageddon is coming about, and the world will end. Aziraphale (an angel) and Crowley (a fallen angel), have lived among humans so long that alll that free will stuff has rubbed off on them, and they kinda like humans and earth, so they decide to interfere with the ineffable plan and stop Armageddon…

If you like Terry Pratchett, you will like this book. But it’s not one of his usual Discworld books or something like Johnny and the dead – the dark humour and great storytelling of Neil Gaiman add a very new twist, making this one of the best books either author has written. My first Gaiman book, this left me hungry for more.

4th of July

~ Enno ~ 1 Comment

The official 4th of July celebrations in Norway always happens on the last weekend before 4th of July – so that families can come and enjoy it together. My friend April was helping with the organization this year, and I dopped by to see how they were doing.

I came just in time to help with the cleaning up. Perfect timing as ever, because it meant I didn’t have to stand in line with a lot of screaming kids to fight for a ride on the bull.

I managed to stay up for 16 seconds.

Doppelspieler

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Mit so etwas hat man als Eressea-Spielleiter zu tun. Ist das nicht toll? Die Namen der Beteiligten habe ich zensiert, es handelt sich da um Spieler, die relativ weit bekannt sind. tut auch nichts zur Sache, wirklich.

Date: Wed, 02 Jul 2003 21:10:41 +0200
From: Doppelspieler
To: Enno Rehling
Subject: Re: Partei xxxx

Hi

| Du schickst seit mindestens 16 Wochen jede Woche die
| Befehle für die Partei xxxx und yyyy ein.
Ich war in einem Buendis mit *censored* und als Daemon auf sie angewiesen. Obwohl ich viele ihre Zwerge finanzierte haute sie ohne ein Wort in den Sack und aenderte die email auf mich. Wenn ich die Zwerge bisher spielte
dann weil die Daemonen ohne sie nict spielbar sidn und weil ich hoffte dass ich doch noch eine Vertretung finden wuerde.

| Du beide Parteien spielt, und gelegentlich auch noch
| zzzz.
Das war doch klar dass *removed* nicht lange von Eressea lassen konnte und seine Partei wieder uebernehmen wuerde. Das muss man die Partei doch nihct gleich in die Tonne klopfen.

| Ich muss Dir nicht erklären, was Doppelspiel ist, oder?
| Die Partei wird diese Woche aus dem Spiel genommen.
| Und wenn von Dir nochmal für irgendeine Partei ausser
| für yyyy Befehle eintreffen, dann verschwindet die
| andere Partei auch. Obowhl, eigentlich sollte ich die
| gleich mit rauskegeln. Das macht mich jetzt echt
| stinkesauer.
Wird vielleicht gar nicht noetig sein denn meine arme Partei stirbt in Raten und ich uberlege sowiso schon die ganze Zeit ob ich nicht einfach aufgebe und sie toete.
Ich wollte in den naechsten 2 Zuegen wenigstens eine Hand voll auf eine andere Insel retten. Aber dafuer haette ich wegen dem Hunger auf eurer Insel Zwischenstation machen muessen. Ich ahtte *censored* gebeten mit dir deswegen Kontakt aufzunehmen weil er sicherlich mehr Einfluss bei dir hat als ich. Aber da du ‘echt stinkesauer’ bist ist das dann wohl von vornherein zum scheitern verurteilt.

Star Wars Galaxies, first impressions

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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…

Now playing: Never on Sunday – Radiohead

Second Copy

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A week ago, both my harddrives were not recognized, and my PC booted saying “insert system disk”. I guess this is among the most dreadful things a PC can say to me, and my mind started racing: “What do I have backups of?”, “I didn’t commit those changes to …” and worst, “My entire mail archive will be lost”. Luckily, Windows had just somehow shot the boot sector, and I was able to get back at the harddisks.

There’s no backup of stuff on my Windows PC. I decided I had to change that, and since I’m too lazy to shove my data onto my home on the network at regular intervals, I needed software to do that job for me. I found Second Copy. It’s something like an rsync for windows, with a user-friendly interface. You say which folders it should back up, and every few hours, it checks whether you’ve made changes and synchronizes them to the target directory (a folder in my home). It can also store the backup in a ZIP file. Or, if you want two computers to be in synch, it can synchronize in both directions.

I analyzed which folders I’d really miss in case of a crash, and now I use it to synchronize my User Profile, My Mail, and my local Documents folder.

This is very, very useful stuff, and I recommend you try it out for yourself. It costs money, though, so if any of you anyone seen something like it on sourceforge or anywhere that we can use for free, that would of course be even better…

My Triptych highscore

~ Enno ~ 1 Comment

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