Umbral Echoes Blog

For those interested, here are the components of the system I’m about to build. It’s not top-of-the-line, but I’m pretty happy with the price/performance balance.  🙂  Parts should all be here by early next week.

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-790XTA-UD4 (AMD, SATA 6Gb/s,USB 3, supports dual video cards)
There were cheaper options, and I’m only getting 1 video card and not 2, but I wanted SATA 6, USB 3, and the possibility for 2 cards, for future upgrades.

Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 925 Deneb 2.8GHz Quad-Core
Nothing too fancy here.  It’s reasonably fast, but I didn’t want to go crazy.  Processor speed is actually less important to overall system speed than most people think.

Video Card: XFX Radeon 5850 1 GB
Here I splurged a bit.  DirectX 11 card, again looking to the future.  I could have gotten two lesser cards for slightly cheaper, and just as good of performance, but that would be noisier, take more power, and not leave room for future upgrades without replacing both cards. This way if I want more power, I add another 8580 (which by that time will have gone down in price significantly).

RAM: G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600
This is fast RAM.  Not as fast as the motherboard is capable of, but any faster starts quickly driving the price vs. performance into exponential (i.e. bad) territory. The computer I’m on now actually has 5 GB of RAM, so… well, in a few months it’s possible I’ll double this to 8, since I will be using this system as a work computer as well, and that means having lots of memory-intensive applications open.

Hard Drive (system): OCZ Agility 60 GB SSD

This baby is probably the biggest factor in this build affecting normal system performance.  It has a small amount of storage space (as most SSDs do), but solid state disks offer amazing performance. Here is an article from Microsoft about Windows 7’s performance on SSDs, and some of the benefits of SSDs in general. My housemate Cary has one in his Alienware system, and he says he definitely notices the difference. Coworker Sparr had a netbook that ran from an SSD and he also said it performed notably better than a standard hard drive — faster boot-up and overall operation, lower power consumption, no noise. Having your operating system run from one of these will nearly halve your boot-up time. Putting WoW on it will cut your load times similarly.

Hard Drive (storage): Western Digital Caviar Black 750GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s
This is where media and programs (that don’t need to load up really fast) will go. Nothing too special, though it is the higher-end Western Digital line, with a 32 MB cache. And they say once you go (Western Digital) Black…

Case:  Raidmax Smilodon ATX-612WBP
Honestly I don’t love this case — don’t have it, I just don’t love it.  However, it was on special, and the case is going to sit out of my sight for 99% of the time I’m using the computer anyway, so I mostly just needed something that will hold the rest of the stuff. And it’s not particularly ugly, just not particularly pretty (in my opinion) either.  If I was buying today instead of a few days ago, I’d probably get this case, which they’re running a special on for $50 and free shipping (coupon code TTCPN-N0012USU-FEB10).

There are also some odds and ends, like Scythe Slipstream case fans (better fans, and quieter), a 780W power supply, etc.  This build was mostly based on this article, with upgrades where I felt would be good, and some components switched out where I could find a better deal, or a better product for the same or lesser price. Ironically, since that build was written, some prices have actually gone up (I assume due to the weakening of the dollar, and the fact that most components are made overseas).

I did forget to order a 2.5″ to 3.5″ adapter for the SSD, but that’s livable — I can get one of those for less than $10 somewhere local.

First off, let me say that I’ve only been in one Google Wave gaming session so far, and have seen a few other sessions.  So I haven’t done very in-depth or broad testing of this stuff.  Also, Google Wave itself is evolving — it’s still in beta, so I’m not going to talk about bugs, or technical issues that I’m sure will be hammered out.

My friend and former coworker Justin Achilli is running a 3.5 D&D game via Google Wave, as an experiment in its viability for online roleplay.  He’s shared his own thoughts, and I’d like to share a few of mine from a player’s perspective.

So, from my perspective, so far I’m getting exactly what I expected.   It’s somewhat of a mix of playing via live chat (of which I have several years experience on White Wolf’s now-defunct moderated chats) and play-by-post, with most of the advantages and disadvantages therein.   I’ll list some below, and again, I’m going to refrain from putting any disadvantages down that I expect to be addressed (e.g. it’s still fairly slow and has the occasional glitch).

Advantages (compared to tabletop)

• It’s easier to schedule.  No transit time to/from; just log in and bam, you’re in game.
• When a player misses a session, the playback feature makes it easy for them to get caught up.
• It’s possible to narrate aspects of your character’s actions in more stylish detail.
• It’s easier to have secret side-conversations where necessary (no passing of notes or leaning over and whispering).
• There’s a complete record of each session, which game masters or payers can look back on (or search) if they’ve forgotten something.
• It’s possible for several people to type simultaneously without the “talking over one another” effect you get in real life.
• It allows you to multitask without being distracting to others.

Disadvantages

• Hell of a lot slower-going than tabletop for character interaction.
• Even slower than that for combat — and the more crunchy the combat, the slower it is.
• More impersonal.
• Can’t use things like mood music/lighting to set the mood (though it would be easy to use a third-party app to stream a playlist).

Overall I prefer tabletop, but I do like online mediums (including Wave) as an option if tabletop isn’t.   I think Wave offers some advantages over both chat-based and PbM/PbP play as well — it’s the best of both worlds when talking about those two options.  I also think Wave is better for more story-centric games/systems than crunchy games, but I’m sure that there will be a number of plugins (or “robots” as Wave calls them) for that sort of thing.  There are already some robots for things like dice rolling, maps, and other such things.  I’m excited to see what can and will be done.

For my initial impressions, I am going to leave out issues that are obviously bugs — the game doesn’t even officially launch for 2 days, and there really aren’t that many bugs to speak of.  Far fewer than I’ve seen in most products at release these days, in fact.  In any case, this review will be pretty scattershot — a lot of 90 degree turns.  So strap yourself in.

Character Creation

First things first: the character creator.  It’s even better than the one in City of Heroes, which itself was lightyears ahead of everything else I’ve seen.  However, I say “better” with a few caveats.  The Champions Online character creator is lacking some costume basics — for example, there is only one option for an emblem on your back, no option for a trench coat, and other small things of that nature.  It’s also tough to find some of the options; they seem grouped somewhat unintuitively to me (for example, the “Shirts w/Integrated Shoulders” section has no items that have integrated shoulderpieces).  But from my experience with City of Heroes, I know that this will be fixed in time.  I think one of the things they were trying to do was avoid copying City of Heroes costume pieces.  In fact, I’d bet they went to great lengths to do so, for legal reasons.  And with the huge library of things available in City of Heroes, it will be difficult to come up with new pieces that are notably different in Champions Online.

Depth of Play

The game definitely has more depth than CoH.  Around level 5, you start working with the crafting system, in fact.  This is a little too soon for my tastes — I like to just run around and get the basics down for the first hour or two of play, myself.  Were I not already familiar with the CoH crafting system, I would probably be confused by this.  Actually, I am familiar with the CoH crafting system, and I am still a little confused by this.  The main way to build things seems to be by deconstructing items that you get (akin to disenchanting in World of Warcraft), and then using those base components to build something.  You also gain skill much faster by deconstructing things than by building things.

Speaking of level 5, you get a fast-travel power at level 5.  I have not the words for how awesome this is.

Annoyances

This brings me to my first annoyance.  Latency.  This is a huge one.  I’m not talking about real “lag,” but rather when you press W to go forward, it takes about 0.5 seconds to start going.  Same when you let off to stop.  Which isn’t even noticeable when you’re running around normally, but once you get that travel power, it can make you overshoot your target by about 30 feet.

Another annoyance is the aggro range of mobs, which is ginormous.  Actually, I like this in theory, because it seems more realistic.  Seems pretty silly that if you’re thumping some dude’s friend 30 feet away, he’s not going to come over.  However, the problem is that in most of the zones (that I’ve been in so far, anyway), there are mobs strewn about every 30-40 feet.  When you fight one small group, at least one adjacent group generally joins the fray.  This gets really annoying when you’re trying to fight a mini-boss, and/or when you’re about to die and attempting to run to a safe place.  It’s also bad because you can’t pull the camera out very far.  I like for my camera to be out to where I can see around 3-4x the aggro range around me, at least.  Can’t do that here.

Combat and Missions

This is also made more of an issue by the game’s AI, which I must say is fairly good.  If you’re using a bunch of close-range attacks, and your opponent has a ranged attack, then they will generally try to distance themselves.  Villains and sometimes even normal mobs will go out to get reinforcements.  This makes the game feel a lot more realistic than other MMOs I’ve played, and also adds a bit of challenge

The combat system is pretty straightforward, aside from one thing: blocking.  You can press the Shift key to block attacks.  This is very important in a lot of villain fights — there will be a visual indicator (starburst usually) over the villain indicating that some big attack is coming.  If you don’t block, you get walloped for a big chunk.  If you do block, then it’s not so bad.  It makes combat feel more active.  They still need to work on the targeting though; often you find yourself in the middle of a pretty big group, and tabbing through to get to that villain isn’t always feasible.

I really like the mission system overall.  It shows you on the map and minimap exactly where your objectives are, circled in the case of objectives that are in a general area.  When you mouse over it, the mission name comes up you can click on it to open a description of the mission details.  Very nice for keeping track of what you’re doing.  There are also impromptu group missions, that you don’t actually have to group up for.  For example, aliens are invading and when you come near the city defense system, you can jump in and start helping to defend it.  There are several phases to this, with different objectives (defend the cannon, get parts for it, etc.).  When you’re through, it opens up another quest for you, and it also shows you a ranking of who helped the most.  Then the mission resets.

I think this open mission system is really great, because a lot of MMO players frankly aren’t very social.  It can be tedious and annoying to get a group together.  But if you can just jump in and coordinate your efforts, then you skip all of the awkward and sometimes tedious rigmarole of forming  a group.  Plus, it’s very superhero-like to see a situation, then just jump in.

Overall Impression

Overall, the game feels much more superhero-like than City of Heroes.  You can take out the mooks and minions like chaff (unless you do something dumb and really overload yourself), which is thematic.  The game has extremely customizable character aesthetics, even more so than its progenitor.  It’s a lot deeper than City of Heroes, which I hope translates to a more sustainable end-game.

This is a post for MMO gamers (and possibly comic fans). The rest of you should probably feel free to skip it, lest your eyes glaze over.

At GenCon this year, I spent a fair amount of time at the Champions Online booth. This is a superhero MMO made by Cryptic. Yes, the same Cryptic that produced City of Heroes. This is, essentially, City of Heroes+++. It was both sad, but informative, that almost every question and comment I overheard was comparing CO to CoH.

There are cosmetic improvements. The game looks a lot more comic-book-like, with the thicker black outlines and cell shading. You can customize how your powers look. Do you want that power beam to come from a jewel in your forehead instead of your fists, or maybe from your chest? You can make it so.  There are even more character appearance customization options than in CoH (an almost overwhelming amount, in fact).  There are some cool gameplay improvements — you can mix and match powersets as you please, so there are no set archetypes, for example. You get 14 total powers at max level (if I recall), and you can mix and match them from different power sets as you please.

But what I really want to talk about are the more groundbreaking aspects of this game.


Perhaps the biggest is player-created arch-villains. At level 20, you start getting clues that someone is watching you. For example, you might find some pictures of yourself during the last mission. These develop into a storyline, and then at level 25, you actually design your own arch-villain. You choose their power set (though not specific powers), design their look, determine what sort of a villain they are (mastermind, mad genius, thuggish brute, etc.), and you even design the look of their minions. You proceed along a storyline that culminates in an epic battle, and your arch-nemesis being jailed.

And then, you get to make another one. Think Batman here, putting people away in Arkham Asylum. And just like that, sometimes your villains will escape and come after you. Sometimes several of them will escape. And if you group up with people, sometimes your arch-villains will also team up against you.

I haven’t seen this in action yet, but if the implementation is as cool as the idea, this could really go light-years forward in making an MMO feel more personalized. I’m very much looking forward to it.

On a technological level, everyone is on one server (just with different instances of zones). That’s right, no more, “Oh you play too? Awesome, what server are you on? … Oh, well I guess I could maybe make a toon on that server.” All MMOs should do this, and I think in the future, I think most will.

But this brings up another issue: it is (or, can be) sometimes difficult to find an unused name in an MMO when everyone is split between servers, much less with everyone on the same server. Well, you can use whatever name you want, even if someone else has used it. You’re uniquely identified by your account name + character name. So there can be fifteen Shadowbats, or Tits McGees. I’m not quite sure how I feel about this, but I think I will like it.

There are Open Missions, which I think have promise.  As you’re flying by somewhere, there is a bank robbery in process.  You, and other heroes, can intervene.  No creating a group necessary, you just jump in and do it, and get a mission reward at the end of it corresponding to how much you helped.  This I will have to see in action, but I love the idea.  Helps a lot in making the game more… well, open.

On the marketing side, they’re offering a lifetime subscription option for $200, but I believe this is only good until the release date of September 1st. It’s ingenious from a marketing perspective (City of Heroes was also very good when it came to marketing ploys). From a consumer perspective, I feel like I’m taking a $200 gamble though. Sure, in about 14 months it’s paid for itself. But what if, once the game goes live, I don’t like it after 6 months of play? I suppose I could always sell my lifetime membership to someone else, but I’m relatively sure that would be against the terms of use.  I will note that I’ve gone ahead and ordered a lifetime subscription, and am feeling a little unsure of it even though I think this game has a lot of promise.

Overall I’m pretty excited.  There are other cool features to this game that I haven’t even touched on, and it seems like CO is doing a better job of appealing to both casual players (like me) and hardcore gamers, though still with more of a focus on the casual player.  My preorder copy is on its way, and once I get that I’ll be able to delve deeper into this game.

I bought a digital camera for my mother for Mother’s Day — got her a Kodak EasyShare based on the advice of friends (thanks guys!).  I love technology, and I love finding just the right tool for the job.  So this is a post for all the geeks* out there.  Below is a list of programs, services, and mashups (like Twitter + Jott/Facebook, or WordPress + Livejournal/MySpace) that I use on a daily basis. You probably know about a lot of these things, but maybe not all.  I love to try out new things.  I love to tinker, so every blue moon** I make a post like this.  If any of you out there have anything to add, then by all means leave a comment and tell me what your technological must-haves are.

Being a tech reviewer would be my dream job — I absolutely love testing out gadgets and programs.  I could write a few pages on each of these things, but I tried to keep it as short as possible.  Information below the cut.

* I use the term “geek” in a positive way.  I have never used, nor taken, any such word in a derogatory fashion, even if it was meant that way.  To me, “geek” means “someone who is considerably more intelligent than the average person, so much so that they are constantly using their brain.”

** I had a discussion recently wherein I was told that a lot of people don’t know what a “blue moon” is.  I find this notion staggering.

Continue reading

I run my personal site’s blog using WordPress. It automatically posts everything I write there to LiveJournal. Well, WordPress has recently come out with a major upgrade, so up shall I grade.  Hopefully nothing bad will come of this.

EDIT: Looks like everything went swimmingly.  For those of you who have a similar setup, there was one small change that needed to be made to the LiveJournal crossposter plugin, and that change can be found here.

So I was signing up for a site today that had a Captcha (the “type the text you see below”).  These things seem to be getting harder and harder to read by humans, it seems like.  Well, this one is over the line.  The instructions were to, “Enter both words below, separated by a space.“  Well, can you tell what the word on the left says?  Because I sure as hell can’t.

LifeHacker.com recently had an article on using the open-source custom firmware called Tomato. Basically, this replaces your router’s firmware and give you a lot more control over it. The main thing that most people find useful is the ability to increase the wireless signal. I had to stretch the router way across the loft to position it so that I got WiFi reception in the basement, but using this hack I can put the router right by the cable modem and still get great reception.

It also has some nifty features like a real-time bandwidth graph (that updates as you’re watching it), and also a lot of advanced features. Want World of Warcraft to have higher priority than other Internet traffic? Want to make it so that certain websites can only be visited certain times of the day? Want to turn off the wireless during certain times of the day? You can do all that and more.

Me, I just like the neat bandwidth graph (below), and the ability to boost the WiFi signal.  It was also hella easy to install, and use, though the advanced features could have used some better documentation.

From a series called “You Suck at Photoshop.” There are 4 in this series currently, and here’s #2. The guy reminds me a lot of Dane Cook.

Having decided that driving a stick shift makes talking on a cell phone a bit unwieldy, I decided to get a Bluetooth headset.  I had one before, but… well, I lost it within about a week of getting it.  This time I went for the BlueAnt Z9.  It’s not the sexiest thing in the world, but it received some good reviews, and seemed to have good noise cancellation technology — something that might come in handy in convention season.

So far, it’s worked beautifully.  The people (well, person) I’ve talked to said that my voice was actually clearer with the BlueAnt than it was using the phone itself.  Hooking up to my phone, the Samsung Sync, was painless.  They even release semi-regular firmware updates, that fix issues and make other improvements.  It’s pretty easy to operate, light, and comfortable.  I’m not the sort of person to wear it all day long (I just wear it when I’m in the car), but if I were, I don’t think it would get uncomfortable to do so.  I haven’t tried the ultra-noise-cancellation mode, but I have high hopes — the website has a demonstration of the technology, that seems to put it on the level of the Jawbone.

In other news, those of you who use several online services, such as Facebook, Yahoo profiles, Twitter,  Gmail, LinkedIn, YouTube, WordPress, Delicious, Microsoft Network (MSN), etc. will be interested in the DataPortability workgroup.  Below is a video that explains it, but the basic idea is you have your data, and when you want to make a profile on X site, you say, “Here’s my stuff — profile info, media, friends, et cetera.”  And the site keeps sync’d with that central repository of data.  Make a blog post?  It’s posted to all your sites that support that.  Upload a picture?  Ditto.  The names/sites mentioned above have all gotten in (Microsoft just recently), so there’s a pretty big push in this direction.

DataPortability – Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.