Posts
Read the latest Janet Evanovich "Stephanie Plum" book two weeks ago titled "Twelve Sharp". Pretty good, but Stephanie's car doesn't get blown up--hey! You gotta stick with your conventions once you establish them. And when's the movie coming out?
and apparently Evanovich wrote some "romance" novels under a pen-name before happening onto Ms Plum and they are getting reprinted now. Not sure if I want to read them, altho they are self-described as "romantic comedies", which might be ok. I think there's a couple of other new ones by JE that I don't have, in her other series. It's about to be xmas vacation time, which means more reading. (Yeah, I know, when do I fit that in between the game-playing).
if you look at JE's website (http://www.evanovich.com/), you can see she has now gone to having fans submit book titles for the Plum series. hmm. And there's another in-between Plum book, like the xmas book a couple of years ago; this one is for Valentine's Day.
Friday, December 15, 2006
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Neverwinter Nights 2 thoughts...
Yeah, it's another game post. I got NWN2 the day after Thanksgiving at Best Buy (a shopping tale in itself), when it was $25 (my price range for a game I don't know much about yet).
It was not fun to install. The install runs ok at first...next thing you need to do is run the updater, and that was taking forever (85MB download, seemed to be going at about 2400 baud). And on top of that, it wouldn't run on my best computer. Which stunk, because I had just gotten a new ATI X1600 video card, expressly because this game was reputed to require it (not quite true, my old 9600 worked, but better is better).
Why wouldn't it run? Is it going to take an Advanced Degree (tm) to figure it out? I was hoping not.
Well, the root cause is that my best machine is Win XP x64 (also it's own tale). I hunted online a bit to find some answers, but that really went nowhere. At first, at startup, I was getting a message about not being able to authenticate the installer DVD, but that was because I had a typo in the security keycode. After I fixed that, at startup it just wouldn't run. No indication of what was wrong other than it would not run. Sent in a complaint to the game support website.
For test purposes, I went back to the old PC (Win2k), installed there, let the updater run (patch 1.02), etc. Well, the game *would* in fact run, albeit slowly. So I played it that way for a couple of weeks. Actual problems encountered are really ones of computer speed rather than anything else (a serious battle overwhelms that machine).
Then I read there was a new patch (1.03), got that installed, no detectable improvements, and a week later I remembered to try it on the x64 box...maybe the startup prob was fixed? Yes indeedy, so now I'm playing on the good machine, as I should be--all the other games I play work just fine on that machine (and with the new vid-card, UT04 can be cranked up pretty high on the visual details).
But there are other problems...NWN 1 had micro map sections, so you did a lot of map-loading. Same for NWN 2, and it is REALLLY slow...Guys, this is a solved problem: look at Dungeon Siege and Morrowind/Oblivion. Solved years ago. Buy their solution and drop this map-loading monkey-biz. Everybody else, too--STOP!
-----
Your teammates/companions are run by Artificial Stupidity. The behavior-control window says "Artificial Intelligence", but it's not. Your teammates generally will run into battle, right when you don't want them to. Usually a battle above their pay-grade. In NWN 1, you'd have to spend a bunch of time preventing your one companion from doing something stupid, so I stoppped using one, except as the occasional decoy. Here, you pretty much have to have a team, most battles can't be won with you by yourself (from Dungeon Siege: "it's easier to take on an army when you are one"). And regularly you are going to have to micro-manage what they do in order to win battles. Gak! Once you accept this, and figure it out [Qara: put all her spells into groups on the quickcast selectors], it's mostly not so hard.
There's a lot more meaning to character dialog-interaction in NWN 2. You can do things that annoy your companions to the point they stop cooperating. Of course, this makes them end of dead often, so that's stupid. Early on I managed to annoy Neeshka enough that she doesn't follow, so now I never take her with me. Bishop is pretty worthless, too, he just argues a lot.
Merchants NEVER have any new stuff. They only have what they started with, and what you sell to them. GUYS! GET A CLUE HERE! In the real world, merchants would have new/different stuff quite often. Oblivion has the same problem. (Dungeon Siege does this right--if you travel far enough that a merchant location pages all the way out, if you return, that merchant has a totally new load; this is great for when you don't see something you want to buy, just leave and come back.) Result: shopping is not that interesting; other online descriptions indicate that if you want better stuff than dropped loot, you have to do weapon/armor crafting. NOT INTERESTED--don't force me to do this.
The game is WAY too much about the dice rolls. GUYS! simplify that down to what it really means for me, I am NOT interested in trying to figure out what a "saving throw" is, or what it means when a weapon has 1d8 damage plus 3 enhancement and 1d6 electrical. Just say 3-11 damage + 1-6 electrical damage, or 4-17. Makes a lot more sense. And if a spell does 1d6 damage per caster level, and I'm looking at a specific caster, tell me the actual number FOR THAT CASTER, because you can know directly what that caster's level is: if caster is level 10, then the damage number is 10-60. Why do you make me work so hard to figure all this out? NOT INTERESTED.
And you cannot know how much health an opponent has left; if you are able to watch the red numbers go by as hits occur, and add them, then when it's dead you have the total. But I want an estimate in advance, so that I know what spells I should cast, or whether an opponent is strong enough to be a problem or ignorable for a while.
specifics (spoilers): Black Garius is not nearly as hard a takedown as you fear. Two previous opponents were harder. Lorne is really tough, I had to use a blastglobe on him; when doing that, you have to keep him in the original blast radius so he can take extra damage while it keeps going off.
-----
Later: I've bailed out on this game. Too many things have bugged me for too long. Got to the point where you have to visit the really old dragon, and then fight the two black dragons. It's close to impossible to get your team to do the right thing here, which is NOT to all rush forward in order to participate in the cut-scene, and then be right in front of where the dragons appear. STAY AWAY ALREADY!
Plus: although this has richer story, it's still pretty dang linear. Oblivion did far better.
It was not fun to install. The install runs ok at first...next thing you need to do is run the updater, and that was taking forever (85MB download, seemed to be going at about 2400 baud). And on top of that, it wouldn't run on my best computer. Which stunk, because I had just gotten a new ATI X1600 video card, expressly because this game was reputed to require it (not quite true, my old 9600 worked, but better is better).
Why wouldn't it run? Is it going to take an Advanced Degree (tm) to figure it out? I was hoping not.
Well, the root cause is that my best machine is Win XP x64 (also it's own tale). I hunted online a bit to find some answers, but that really went nowhere. At first, at startup, I was getting a message about not being able to authenticate the installer DVD, but that was because I had a typo in the security keycode. After I fixed that, at startup it just wouldn't run. No indication of what was wrong other than it would not run. Sent in a complaint to the game support website.
For test purposes, I went back to the old PC (Win2k), installed there, let the updater run (patch 1.02), etc. Well, the game *would* in fact run, albeit slowly. So I played it that way for a couple of weeks. Actual problems encountered are really ones of computer speed rather than anything else (a serious battle overwhelms that machine).
Then I read there was a new patch (1.03), got that installed, no detectable improvements, and a week later I remembered to try it on the x64 box...maybe the startup prob was fixed? Yes indeedy, so now I'm playing on the good machine, as I should be--all the other games I play work just fine on that machine (and with the new vid-card, UT04 can be cranked up pretty high on the visual details).
But there are other problems...NWN 1 had micro map sections, so you did a lot of map-loading. Same for NWN 2, and it is REALLLY slow...Guys, this is a solved problem: look at Dungeon Siege and Morrowind/Oblivion. Solved years ago. Buy their solution and drop this map-loading monkey-biz. Everybody else, too--STOP!
-----
Your teammates/companions are run by Artificial Stupidity. The behavior-control window says "Artificial Intelligence", but it's not. Your teammates generally will run into battle, right when you don't want them to. Usually a battle above their pay-grade. In NWN 1, you'd have to spend a bunch of time preventing your one companion from doing something stupid, so I stoppped using one, except as the occasional decoy. Here, you pretty much have to have a team, most battles can't be won with you by yourself (from Dungeon Siege: "it's easier to take on an army when you are one"). And regularly you are going to have to micro-manage what they do in order to win battles. Gak! Once you accept this, and figure it out [Qara: put all her spells into groups on the quickcast selectors], it's mostly not so hard.
There's a lot more meaning to character dialog-interaction in NWN 2. You can do things that annoy your companions to the point they stop cooperating. Of course, this makes them end of dead often, so that's stupid. Early on I managed to annoy Neeshka enough that she doesn't follow, so now I never take her with me. Bishop is pretty worthless, too, he just argues a lot.
Merchants NEVER have any new stuff. They only have what they started with, and what you sell to them. GUYS! GET A CLUE HERE! In the real world, merchants would have new/different stuff quite often. Oblivion has the same problem. (Dungeon Siege does this right--if you travel far enough that a merchant location pages all the way out, if you return, that merchant has a totally new load; this is great for when you don't see something you want to buy, just leave and come back.) Result: shopping is not that interesting; other online descriptions indicate that if you want better stuff than dropped loot, you have to do weapon/armor crafting. NOT INTERESTED--don't force me to do this.
The game is WAY too much about the dice rolls. GUYS! simplify that down to what it really means for me, I am NOT interested in trying to figure out what a "saving throw" is, or what it means when a weapon has 1d8 damage plus 3 enhancement and 1d6 electrical. Just say 3-11 damage + 1-6 electrical damage, or 4-17. Makes a lot more sense. And if a spell does 1d6 damage per caster level, and I'm looking at a specific caster, tell me the actual number FOR THAT CASTER, because you can know directly what that caster's level is: if caster is level 10, then the damage number is 10-60. Why do you make me work so hard to figure all this out? NOT INTERESTED.
And you cannot know how much health an opponent has left; if you are able to watch the red numbers go by as hits occur, and add them, then when it's dead you have the total. But I want an estimate in advance, so that I know what spells I should cast, or whether an opponent is strong enough to be a problem or ignorable for a while.
specifics (spoilers): Black Garius is not nearly as hard a takedown as you fear. Two previous opponents were harder. Lorne is really tough, I had to use a blastglobe on him; when doing that, you have to keep him in the original blast radius so he can take extra damage while it keeps going off.
-----
Later: I've bailed out on this game. Too many things have bugged me for too long. Got to the point where you have to visit the really old dragon, and then fight the two black dragons. It's close to impossible to get your team to do the right thing here, which is NOT to all rush forward in order to participate in the cut-scene, and then be right in front of where the dragons appear. STAY AWAY ALREADY!
Plus: although this has richer story, it's still pretty dang linear. Oblivion did far better.
Monday, October 23, 2006
Oblivion final game thoughts
I finally got around to completing the primary task sequence in Oblivion in early fall 2006. Took me a while, I tended to wander in-between subtasks on this sequence. The game is designed for you to do that, so no big deal.
The endgame on this isn't really all that hard, once you understand the key aspects to unfettered progress. If I'd played Morrowind a certain way, or knew some things from other games, maybe it would have been easier...otherwise it's an accidental discovery, not something that requires an Advanced Degree(tm).
Anyway. The key thing you want to achieve is Chameleon=100 magic enhancement. You do this by a combination or things: enchanting armor, and a spell or potion. I enchanted armor so that it was constant effect. I had a body armor piece I found with chameleon = 30, the Ring of Khajiiti with chameleon = 35, and 2 other pieces of armor I enchanted to chameleon = 20. Total = 105. Why is this good? Because you are permanently invisible, even while attacking or swimming. Sneak = 100 is good, but once you attack something, it can see you, and you can't sneak while swimming. Chameleon, however, is permanent, even when attacking and swimming.
So how do you get there? You aren't going to find enough items that are chameleon-enchanted, you are going to have to make some to get there quicker. This means that you have to buy the smallest enchantment spell that does enchantment (I think you get this from someone in the Mages Guild in Chorrol), and this means joining the Mages Guild--also required to enable you to do the enchantments. Then you have to run Mages quests until you get access to the Unseen University (not affiliated with Hyde University) and the enchanting store. Then you need some Grand Soul Gems with Grand Souls in them, which is achieved by fighting and soul-trapping. Oblivion doesn't seem to have the equivalent weapons of jinkblade and Soul Reaper from Morrowind, so you'll have to make them, too.
Once you have chameleon = 100, you can go anywhere with impunity, with no fear of detection or danger. You don't need to sneak any longer, either, except when you want to do critical strike on something. This makes Umbra a fairly easy takedown, which she's not, otherwise. It no longer matters how good you are with your sword, or spells, or whatever. No one can see you, ever, except when you talk to them, and those circumstances are harmless.
Result: the game is almost pointlessly easy. I might start over just to test how fast you can go from nowhere to finished with Camoran via the 100% chameleon route.
Money has little or no purpose in this game. Merchants aren't going to have enough of anything interesting to warrant buying, you will find/capture far better stuff out in the field. You do want to buy spells, that doesn't happen any other way, but you don't need too many. Heal, feather, summon, open lock, those are important; the rest are just baggage. In fact, you can progress on opening locks via spells far faster/easier than you can with lockpicks--I didn't hardly bother with them. (Well, I wrote "progress", but really I meant just opening them, not "security" skill level-up.)
Leveling up is of limited value, it seems, just makes the opponents harder, until you discover that that's how you get the better loot off opponents, which is only siginificant for buying those few spells you need. I recommend ignoring crates and barrels as loot containers. In Morrowind, barrels and crates often contained something interesting, like grand soul gems. In Oblivion, they probably contain plates and pants. Chests have goodies that are valuable, but even that only goes just so far. In the endgame, one of Mankar Camoran's sidekicks has a really high-value ring (21000), and since you can kill him and take that ring as many times over and over as you want (I did four or five), you could have mega-bucks really quick. Except that no merchant can buy that thing for anything near what the game says it is worth--which means that you really have to use a game mod to fix how much money merchants can spend. And given that some places, like inside Oblivion Gates, you can collect enough 5000-gold daedric warhammers to exceed any possible feathering you can manage, you need a game-mod to provide a way to hold onto them (Bag of Holding is good) until you can get back to sell (since there's no Mark/Recall combo). and then after you DO sell the expensive stuff, there's really nothing to buy, so you might as well go with a game mod that provides something worth buying ("Elemental Blades" is good, although the weapon shimmer is distracting). Some loot you'll want to keep, like Helmet of the Hunter (very long-range enemy detection), Black Marsh Helmet (unlimited underwater breathing), Frost Ring (100% ice/frost protection, important for one task, but nowhere else), and glass armor. Otherwise sell the rest, or just leave it behind. You can buy a house in each town, which I did, but not because I wanted a place to sleep everywhere--what's the point of that? (sleeping heals you, but so do spells, and they're actually better.) And you can buy furnishings for them, but that's the only high dollar thing you can do with money here; really kinda pointless.
Repairing your own armor is valuable, because once you reach skill level 75, you can take an armor or weapon from 100 to 125 quality, making it better than it used to be able to be. No merchant armor repair person can do that for you.
And you can bump your light/medium/heavy-armor skill to 100 fairly quickly (my estimate is two hours 0-->100) by letting a rat flail away on you while you heal yourself via spell (assuming, of course, that you are a character class whose magicka regenerates). You could do Block this way, also, but not nearly as fast, since Block tends to cause an opponent to recoil and pause. So maybe if you had multiple rats...And your Alteration skill goes up because you are healing yourself at the same time.
Those are the final thoughts. I've stopped playing this one, other than a small amount of time on it when I got a new graphics card last month. (well, they aren't quite final, Oblivion will get discussed in comparison with other games as I write about them.)
The endgame on this isn't really all that hard, once you understand the key aspects to unfettered progress. If I'd played Morrowind a certain way, or knew some things from other games, maybe it would have been easier...otherwise it's an accidental discovery, not something that requires an Advanced Degree(tm).
Anyway. The key thing you want to achieve is Chameleon=100 magic enhancement. You do this by a combination or things: enchanting armor, and a spell or potion. I enchanted armor so that it was constant effect. I had a body armor piece I found with chameleon = 30, the Ring of Khajiiti with chameleon = 35, and 2 other pieces of armor I enchanted to chameleon = 20. Total = 105. Why is this good? Because you are permanently invisible, even while attacking or swimming. Sneak = 100 is good, but once you attack something, it can see you, and you can't sneak while swimming. Chameleon, however, is permanent, even when attacking and swimming.
So how do you get there? You aren't going to find enough items that are chameleon-enchanted, you are going to have to make some to get there quicker. This means that you have to buy the smallest enchantment spell that does enchantment (I think you get this from someone in the Mages Guild in Chorrol), and this means joining the Mages Guild--also required to enable you to do the enchantments. Then you have to run Mages quests until you get access to the Unseen University (not affiliated with Hyde University) and the enchanting store. Then you need some Grand Soul Gems with Grand Souls in them, which is achieved by fighting and soul-trapping. Oblivion doesn't seem to have the equivalent weapons of jinkblade and Soul Reaper from Morrowind, so you'll have to make them, too.
Once you have chameleon = 100, you can go anywhere with impunity, with no fear of detection or danger. You don't need to sneak any longer, either, except when you want to do critical strike on something. This makes Umbra a fairly easy takedown, which she's not, otherwise. It no longer matters how good you are with your sword, or spells, or whatever. No one can see you, ever, except when you talk to them, and those circumstances are harmless.
Result: the game is almost pointlessly easy. I might start over just to test how fast you can go from nowhere to finished with Camoran via the 100% chameleon route.
Money has little or no purpose in this game. Merchants aren't going to have enough of anything interesting to warrant buying, you will find/capture far better stuff out in the field. You do want to buy spells, that doesn't happen any other way, but you don't need too many. Heal, feather, summon, open lock, those are important; the rest are just baggage. In fact, you can progress on opening locks via spells far faster/easier than you can with lockpicks--I didn't hardly bother with them. (Well, I wrote "progress", but really I meant just opening them, not "security" skill level-up.)
Leveling up is of limited value, it seems, just makes the opponents harder, until you discover that that's how you get the better loot off opponents, which is only siginificant for buying those few spells you need. I recommend ignoring crates and barrels as loot containers. In Morrowind, barrels and crates often contained something interesting, like grand soul gems. In Oblivion, they probably contain plates and pants. Chests have goodies that are valuable, but even that only goes just so far. In the endgame, one of Mankar Camoran's sidekicks has a really high-value ring (21000), and since you can kill him and take that ring as many times over and over as you want (I did four or five), you could have mega-bucks really quick. Except that no merchant can buy that thing for anything near what the game says it is worth--which means that you really have to use a game mod to fix how much money merchants can spend. And given that some places, like inside Oblivion Gates, you can collect enough 5000-gold daedric warhammers to exceed any possible feathering you can manage, you need a game-mod to provide a way to hold onto them (Bag of Holding is good) until you can get back to sell (since there's no Mark/Recall combo). and then after you DO sell the expensive stuff, there's really nothing to buy, so you might as well go with a game mod that provides something worth buying ("Elemental Blades" is good, although the weapon shimmer is distracting). Some loot you'll want to keep, like Helmet of the Hunter (very long-range enemy detection), Black Marsh Helmet (unlimited underwater breathing), Frost Ring (100% ice/frost protection, important for one task, but nowhere else), and glass armor. Otherwise sell the rest, or just leave it behind. You can buy a house in each town, which I did, but not because I wanted a place to sleep everywhere--what's the point of that? (sleeping heals you, but so do spells, and they're actually better.) And you can buy furnishings for them, but that's the only high dollar thing you can do with money here; really kinda pointless.
Repairing your own armor is valuable, because once you reach skill level 75, you can take an armor or weapon from 100 to 125 quality, making it better than it used to be able to be. No merchant armor repair person can do that for you.
And you can bump your light/medium/heavy-armor skill to 100 fairly quickly (my estimate is two hours 0-->100) by letting a rat flail away on you while you heal yourself via spell (assuming, of course, that you are a character class whose magicka regenerates). You could do Block this way, also, but not nearly as fast, since Block tends to cause an opponent to recoil and pause. So maybe if you had multiple rats...And your Alteration skill goes up because you are healing yourself at the same time.
Those are the final thoughts. I've stopped playing this one, other than a small amount of time on it when I got a new graphics card last month. (well, they aren't quite final, Oblivion will get discussed in comparison with other games as I write about them.)
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Personal web-crawler/indexers
The WWW has been around for over a decade now. Crawling and indexing ought to be pretty standard at this point in life, you ought be able to just find one and use it. But that turns out to be A LOT harder than you'd think. Does it take an Advanced Degree (tm) to figure it out? Yes, it does.
I was hoping it didn't, however.
Well, in some sense, it doesn't, until you want to index Acrobat/PDF files and MS Word docs, too. That's where the real trouble starts. There are a number of crawler tools, and really just one indexer (Lucene). But there are very few tools that are combined crawler-indexers.
I didn't investigate them all, so some of my conclusions aren't 100% correct. But for those I did investigate, they all fell rather short of my goals.
So what were my goals?
1) more or less like Google (R)
2) easy to use
3) filter-limitable to an internal website (don't want to index the world)
4) must be able to extract and index the contents of PDF and Word (ppt too would be nice)
5) cost $0 (Google mini appliance is $2k-10k)
6) continuous incremental crawl/index
7) written in Java if I have to do coding
8) web-based interface for search/retrieval
Lucene supplies #8, which is good. I could have written one, not that hard. It's java, which is #7, when combined with a java crawler. #6 comes about as a result of my coding, along with some mods i needed in order to do #4, and solve some other issues (having it only run at night, since that server is occasionally busy during the day, and the search/retrieve functions need to run during the day but not at night). Cost is nothing but my time. PDF/Word extract comes from a couple of other programs--pdf2text, and antiword; both have known failure rates, but work most of the time. #3 is from my own coding, and #2 and #1 are likewise.
Result: other tools I tried claimed to do what I wanted, but didn't. the biggest one of the bunch, nutch, doesn't do PDF/Word, and although some online doc suggests it does, I wasn't able to figure that out. other tools didn't even claim to do PDF/Word, so they only got limited attention. Nutch did do the crawl and index just fine, as well as search and retrieval. but...gotta have PDF and Word. There's a tool I didn't try out, Lius, because I found out about it a lot later, after I ad done nearly all the requisite coding. It too claims to do PDF and Word, and might be better than nutch...too late now.
anyway...if you are interested in my code for this, just email me. I'm happy to give it to you. Parts are sloppy, I warn you. However, it does a good job.
But it did take an Advanced Degree (tm), because of the amount of coding I had to do. Well, that's something I'm good at.
I was hoping it didn't, however.
Well, in some sense, it doesn't, until you want to index Acrobat/PDF files and MS Word docs, too. That's where the real trouble starts. There are a number of crawler tools, and really just one indexer (Lucene). But there are very few tools that are combined crawler-indexers.
I didn't investigate them all, so some of my conclusions aren't 100% correct. But for those I did investigate, they all fell rather short of my goals.
So what were my goals?
1) more or less like Google (R)
2) easy to use
3) filter-limitable to an internal website (don't want to index the world)
4) must be able to extract and index the contents of PDF and Word (ppt too would be nice)
5) cost $0 (Google mini appliance is $2k-10k)
6) continuous incremental crawl/index
7) written in Java if I have to do coding
8) web-based interface for search/retrieval
Lucene supplies #8, which is good. I could have written one, not that hard. It's java, which is #7, when combined with a java crawler. #6 comes about as a result of my coding, along with some mods i needed in order to do #4, and solve some other issues (having it only run at night, since that server is occasionally busy during the day, and the search/retrieve functions need to run during the day but not at night). Cost is nothing but my time. PDF/Word extract comes from a couple of other programs--pdf2text, and antiword; both have known failure rates, but work most of the time. #3 is from my own coding, and #2 and #1 are likewise.
Result: other tools I tried claimed to do what I wanted, but didn't. the biggest one of the bunch, nutch, doesn't do PDF/Word, and although some online doc suggests it does, I wasn't able to figure that out. other tools didn't even claim to do PDF/Word, so they only got limited attention. Nutch did do the crawl and index just fine, as well as search and retrieval. but...gotta have PDF and Word. There's a tool I didn't try out, Lius, because I found out about it a lot later, after I ad done nearly all the requisite coding. It too claims to do PDF and Word, and might be better than nutch...too late now.
anyway...if you are interested in my code for this, just email me. I'm happy to give it to you. Parts are sloppy, I warn you. However, it does a good job.
But it did take an Advanced Degree (tm), because of the amount of coding I had to do. Well, that's something I'm good at.
Sunday, August 13, 2006
Hyde University gets a mascot
well, you don't need an Advanced Degree (tm) to know what it turns out to be. It's the Chili Pepper! I'll have a photo or drawing of it/him/her soon.
The football team is the Chipotles--they are Smokin' Hot! Unsurprisingly. Will try to get a team photo soon, also. No promises, though.
The football team is the Chipotles--they are Smokin' Hot! Unsurprisingly. Will try to get a team photo soon, also. No promises, though.
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Does a woman's hair color affect whether she gets a date?
You wouldn't think so...but maybe it does.
Why would that be? Does it take an Advanced Degree (tm) to figure it out?
Origin: a couple of weeks ago (early June 2006), "Ask Amy" (kinda like Dear Abby) had a letter from in guy ("In Search of a Goddess") in Los Angeles, CA, lamenting that he couldn't find a "nice, wholesome, model-type blond in Los Angeles who wasn't after his money". Apparently he could find brunettes otherwise fitting the description, and mentions one who was leaving to go back to her hometown in middle America. Clearly, the answer for this guy could be "well, look somewhere else", or "don't fixate on blonds". You also have to wonder about whether he looks enough like a god for a goddess to be interested. Could also be that he's as shallow as the question implies.
Yesterday (June 21, 2006), there was a letter from "Redheaded Goddess" who wrote "I am a very nice, pretty shapely, single redhead with a six-figure income--and no dates". [Damn. Where was she 20 years ago?] She continues "My three best friends are blond, a little overweight, and are all married housewives." She does not mention ages. Furthermore, "When we go out, the men look right past me to the blondes." Apparently she asked, and she quotes one guy as saying "all a woman has to do is be blond to be attractive. She can be fat, skinny, old, young, stupid or smart, as long as she is blond."
Whoa. It's all about hair color..? Why would that be?
I don't have any personal experience with this, never had a date with a blonde. Ever. My wife's a brunette (well, actually right now she's blonde, but it comes out of a bottle, and is to disguise the gray). My first girlfriend was a redhead, and I'd hazard a guess that that's my actual preference. But I look at them all. I think I prefer brunettes.
In a purely Darwinian world, a preference for blondes would cause the blonde population to expand over time and eventually eliminate others, excepting for a small population of random variations that would be brunette or redhead (which would maybe drive up their desirability, based on unusualness, keeping that population around).
What are the statistical priors on this? Is there data to support this result? The empirical evidence is against it--if it were true, we should be able to observe it around us--people have been producing offspring for millenia. I grant you that it is only in recent centuries that there's be easy enough travel long enough distances to begin to produce the mixing of previously more homogeneous populations, and perhaps only since 1939 that communication technology was good enough (prior to that you couldn't even see a photo of someone in color to really notice blonde hair, but in 1939 when color movies began to be made, wider distribution of them would expose non-blonde population areas of the world to things they'd never seen, in color). So decent demographic and census data might tell us whether the blondes are starting to dominate the population in places.
But I suspect not. In fact, I think it's something else entirely that drives this. Nothing complicated, but subtle.
Sex.
Recall the phrase "blondes have more fun"? Not exactly clear what that means. Perhaps it could be rephrased as "blondes ARE more fun". What would that mean? I recall a tv show episode (won't say which show as I'd be embarrassed to admit having actually seen it, it was appallingly stupid), in which a woman on the show was referred to as a "fun date" in this episode (for the wrong reasons, of course). "Fun date" meant she'd have sex with you.
What I think the hair color preference is about: blondes are perceived as more sexually liberal, brunettes are sexually conservative, and redheads are dangerous/trouble (witness the historical description of redheads as "fiery", hot-tempered, etc). If you're a single guy, interested in easy sex with women, which targets are you likeliest to pursue? If there's one population group that is easy to get naked with, one that's hard, and one that's weird, which one do you go after? Doesn't take an Advanced Degree (tm) to figure that out.
And if hair color is the distinguishing characteristic visible from a distance, and is a 1:1 correlator with the 3 population groups, and blondes are in the "easy" group...well, surely it doesn't take an Advanced Degree to see what's going on.
If the above is true, and it shouldn't be too hard to get a handle on it, then blondes would be harder to get a date with, because of competition, meaning those of us willing to have sex with non-blondes would still have plenty of opportunity, albeit with the hard and weird groups. But there ought to be more blondes...
It's been my experience (granted, from a limited population sample set, and no blondes) that hair color is NOT an indicator of a woman's willingness to have sex with you. No reason to assume that hair color correlates 1:1 with libido (or that breast-size does either, else we'd see the female population trend towards larger). In fact, give the size of human population around the world, and the randomness and wide distribution of variations, there's no reason to assume there's any detectable correlation between libido and something else.
Except perhaps how they dress. I wonder if that's any indicator? Or would it be a reflection of something else? It's the only other casually modifiable variable.
But perception is reality if you act upon it...so if you think blonde women are more likely to go to bed with you on a casual basis, and others are not, what do you do? You pursue the blondes. Plain and simple. Except that I still prefer to minimize competition, thus a preference for brunettes.
Why would that be? Does it take an Advanced Degree (tm) to figure it out?
Origin: a couple of weeks ago (early June 2006), "Ask Amy" (kinda like Dear Abby) had a letter from in guy ("In Search of a Goddess") in Los Angeles, CA, lamenting that he couldn't find a "nice, wholesome, model-type blond in Los Angeles who wasn't after his money". Apparently he could find brunettes otherwise fitting the description, and mentions one who was leaving to go back to her hometown in middle America. Clearly, the answer for this guy could be "well, look somewhere else", or "don't fixate on blonds". You also have to wonder about whether he looks enough like a god for a goddess to be interested. Could also be that he's as shallow as the question implies.
Yesterday (June 21, 2006), there was a letter from "Redheaded Goddess" who wrote "I am a very nice, pretty shapely, single redhead with a six-figure income--and no dates". [Damn. Where was she 20 years ago?] She continues "My three best friends are blond, a little overweight, and are all married housewives." She does not mention ages. Furthermore, "When we go out, the men look right past me to the blondes." Apparently she asked, and she quotes one guy as saying "all a woman has to do is be blond to be attractive. She can be fat, skinny, old, young, stupid or smart, as long as she is blond."
Whoa. It's all about hair color..? Why would that be?
I don't have any personal experience with this, never had a date with a blonde. Ever. My wife's a brunette (well, actually right now she's blonde, but it comes out of a bottle, and is to disguise the gray). My first girlfriend was a redhead, and I'd hazard a guess that that's my actual preference. But I look at them all. I think I prefer brunettes.
In a purely Darwinian world, a preference for blondes would cause the blonde population to expand over time and eventually eliminate others, excepting for a small population of random variations that would be brunette or redhead (which would maybe drive up their desirability, based on unusualness, keeping that population around).
What are the statistical priors on this? Is there data to support this result? The empirical evidence is against it--if it were true, we should be able to observe it around us--people have been producing offspring for millenia. I grant you that it is only in recent centuries that there's be easy enough travel long enough distances to begin to produce the mixing of previously more homogeneous populations, and perhaps only since 1939 that communication technology was good enough (prior to that you couldn't even see a photo of someone in color to really notice blonde hair, but in 1939 when color movies began to be made, wider distribution of them would expose non-blonde population areas of the world to things they'd never seen, in color). So decent demographic and census data might tell us whether the blondes are starting to dominate the population in places.
But I suspect not. In fact, I think it's something else entirely that drives this. Nothing complicated, but subtle.
Sex.
Recall the phrase "blondes have more fun"? Not exactly clear what that means. Perhaps it could be rephrased as "blondes ARE more fun". What would that mean? I recall a tv show episode (won't say which show as I'd be embarrassed to admit having actually seen it, it was appallingly stupid), in which a woman on the show was referred to as a "fun date" in this episode (for the wrong reasons, of course). "Fun date" meant she'd have sex with you.
What I think the hair color preference is about: blondes are perceived as more sexually liberal, brunettes are sexually conservative, and redheads are dangerous/trouble (witness the historical description of redheads as "fiery", hot-tempered, etc). If you're a single guy, interested in easy sex with women, which targets are you likeliest to pursue? If there's one population group that is easy to get naked with, one that's hard, and one that's weird, which one do you go after? Doesn't take an Advanced Degree (tm) to figure that out.
And if hair color is the distinguishing characteristic visible from a distance, and is a 1:1 correlator with the 3 population groups, and blondes are in the "easy" group...well, surely it doesn't take an Advanced Degree to see what's going on.
If the above is true, and it shouldn't be too hard to get a handle on it, then blondes would be harder to get a date with, because of competition, meaning those of us willing to have sex with non-blondes would still have plenty of opportunity, albeit with the hard and weird groups. But there ought to be more blondes...
It's been my experience (granted, from a limited population sample set, and no blondes) that hair color is NOT an indicator of a woman's willingness to have sex with you. No reason to assume that hair color correlates 1:1 with libido (or that breast-size does either, else we'd see the female population trend towards larger). In fact, give the size of human population around the world, and the randomness and wide distribution of variations, there's no reason to assume there's any detectable correlation between libido and something else.
Except perhaps how they dress. I wonder if that's any indicator? Or would it be a reflection of something else? It's the only other casually modifiable variable.
But perception is reality if you act upon it...so if you think blonde women are more likely to go to bed with you on a casual basis, and others are not, what do you do? You pursue the blondes. Plain and simple. Except that I still prefer to minimize competition, thus a preference for brunettes.
Monday, June 05, 2006
Game AI Advanced Degree
well, I was hoping not to make this post. Really, I was. (and it's late as it is)
but the game AI in Oblivion is way too heavy on the "A" and too light on the "I". The NPCs continue to be phenomenally stupid--really no improvement over Morrowind. So instead of "Artificial Intelligence" we have "Superficial Intelligence" or "Artificial Stupidity".
You recall in Morrowind that the NPCs were stupid like this: you would find them all outside bopping around on their random walks in the town square, in the dark, at 2am, in the rain. And they'd still be there 12 hours later. And a month later. Doing the same random walk, bopping around the town square. Unless they were executing a scripted sequence, which few ever actually did, or if they were attacking something, equally rare. Really brainless.
Well, in Oblivion, many characters have a bit more scripting, but that's all the smarter they are. And you can't make them be any different (well, you can, but it's a game mod; there are a couple of mods available that alter some behaviors--but you can also read that they may be "unbalancing"--if that's true, it means their control mechanism is flawed). In the towns, NPCs have houses they might go to, and then go to bed. You can actually see folks lying in bed; you can wake them for a conversation, but they will go back to bed when you finish. In the morning, they will walk to work. Ok, that's decent scripting, FAR better than Morrowind.
I hated having a sidekick character ever, in Morrowind, even just to escort someplace, because that NPC was still going to run towards a fight if one was available. So in order to do an escort properly, you'd have to talk to that NPC, and tell them "Wait here" and then go clear the route to the destination, then come back and escort safely, because if you didn't and a really difficult opponent was in the middle of the travel, your escorted NPC was going to run to fight that opponent, instead of letting you lead the fight or do it solo, or walk around the problem. One NPC I had to escort I was able to tell to wait, but then I was never able to get it to follow me to the delivery location--not even an option.
So your typical effort with any sort of sidekick was much more oriented around preventing them from doing something stupid--which would mean YOU have to run towards the fight, faster than the sidekick/escortee, which I seldom wanted to do.
Nothing much changed in Oblivion, the NPCs are just as stupid. Same exact thing happens. And the sidekick won't sneak when you do, or have any of your special skills. It'd be one thing if you could have a sidekick early, train them the same way you train, and have them sneak and not attack when you sneak and don't attack. (Neverwinter Nights is a little better about this, but not much.)
But that's not what happens. Conveniently, when you get the assignment about the Black Bow Bandits in Leyawiin, Mazorga the Orc says "I'll wait here until you say you're ready to go", so that you can go clear out most of the danger and then go back for her. Otherwise, since she doesn't sneak, your doing so won't accomplish much, she'll run into the fight in the cave and get overwhelmed--because there's no "I" in the NPC "AI".
I guess doing this well really does take an Advanced Degree (tm), and it seems no one over at Bethesda has one. GAH!
This is really bugging me at this point. I know already that I'm going to have additional tasks in the future in this game where I'm going to be part of a team where I am the only smart player, and the others will all get killed because they don't know how or when to be careful. Dungeon Siege was better about this in the you could at least click down a retreat path and your team would follow, and there were easily-changed control settings about the team's basic tactics; I don't remember them applying to summoned critters, but really, who cares what they do? At least with DS 2 you could put Healing Hands/Wind as an automatic spell, and not have to worry about it too much.
The other thing that bugs me and happens a lot more often (not too many sidekicks in Oblivion) is that when you summon a helper, that helper can't see opponents even if it is standing right next to them unless/until they move. So your summoned thing might not detect an opponent until its 30-second lifetime is almost over. GAH! I summoned it up close so it could attack immediately, not stand there waiting for some motion to detect. Granted, I'm the one with the Helmet of 100-ft life detection, but surely a summoned thing can detect the opponent that is 3 feet away? If I attack the thing they're standing next to, they see it right away, but that's exactly what I want to avoid.
I can create better NPC AI than this. Will the game let me? Do I even want to bother?
I ask because while you can define some NPC actions, if their decision-making/control scheme is inadequate, there's a good chance that there will be unintentional conflicts between actions/goals.
How this ought to work: a character should be able to have any number of goals, in various states, just as you do in your journal. They can be active to different extents, and there can always be background goals. Goal priority can change over time, sometimes in non-obvious ways. Example: a character could have a goal to eat twice a day, once in the morning around 9am, and once later around 7pm. The urgency of completing those goals would be low, depending on what else was going on, and there should be some time flexibility, so breakfast could be from 7am to 10 am, and dinner from 5pm to 9pm. There wouldn't be any real urgency about the meal goal until time was running out at the end of the day (figuring you can skip breakfast, but not dinner). The problem that could arise is if the character has a scripted behavior between 5pm and midnight, and violating it by going to eat breaks the script. This is where a more complex script control is needed, so that character can make a dynamic decision about eating. The script for eating would have to be lower priority than others, and a quest-related required activity would be higher than most others. Probably max priority is self-preservation, so that a character under attack focuses on battle. You can read more about this in various texbooks under "hierarchical planning"; there really is a lot of past work on this general topic.
If you play a while, you will see a few interesting behaviors, but not as many as you should. I've seen characters (just today, in fact) walk past a weapon, encounter a critter, run back for the weapon, pick it up, and use it on the critter (thus protecting me, albeit unintentionally, the critter was chasing me). That was clever. Saw one run down and kill a deer once, not sure why.
But what you don't see, for example, are NPCs healing themselves or each other. Opponents don't do this either; in one sense this is good, because it means that you can wear them down on an ongoing basis, and you can heal yourself while they cannot, giving you an edge, if you are evenly matched in a battle.
I have not yet investigated TES Construction Kit to find out what's possible. I'm going to have to. (later: well probably not, other games to play, not enough time to waste on figuring out this one if I'm not getting paid for it :)
I've read that in Half-life mods there are some very good squad behaviors, where opponents will take cover, support each other, execute group actions, etc. I'm pretty sure I'm a better squad leader than the default battle behaviors in Oblivion.
------- some months later ---------
I've started playing NeverWinter Nights 2 just after Thanksgiving. There are some seriously stupid behaviors in this, too, which are ultimately worse because the game requires you to have a large team the entire way through because of the quantities of opponents in groups (well, you could mostly play solo, but that's a guaranteed path to failure pretty quick).
Where the teammates are stupid:
1) they run towards fights. well, this isn't unusual, it seems. you can arrange to micro-manage your teammates, but I am not interested in doing that. I AM interested in telling them to stand still, stay behind me, etc. Not possible.
2) doorways are a disaster. entirely too often I have found that I have characters stuck in doorways, because I have a character that is blocking the doorway because it is being attacked and the one behind can't get through or help. This happens a lot.
3) they won't retreat when I do. When I run somewhere, I don't care what they are doing, I want the team to follow me. Always. No exceptions.
4) the NPC behavior is, in general, about equal to Morrowind. Most of your NPCs are doing the random bopping around town 24/7. Merchants are awake nonstop.
-------------
Where they are smarter:
1) the dialog trees are better all around, and the overall story is more complex. Morrowind had a complex story, TOO complex, I thought, and the "journal" did a lousy job of keeping you informed about what you needed to do. I didn't play for a while, forgot what I was up to, and ended up just stopping permanently (except for a couple of returns to test ideas).
-------------
I am going to be thrilled when I can play a game where the NPCs really exhibit intelligence (and no, I don't mean by playing in an MMO).
I'm available if someone wants to hire me to solve this problem. Please!
but the game AI in Oblivion is way too heavy on the "A" and too light on the "I". The NPCs continue to be phenomenally stupid--really no improvement over Morrowind. So instead of "Artificial Intelligence" we have "Superficial Intelligence" or "Artificial Stupidity".
You recall in Morrowind that the NPCs were stupid like this: you would find them all outside bopping around on their random walks in the town square, in the dark, at 2am, in the rain. And they'd still be there 12 hours later. And a month later. Doing the same random walk, bopping around the town square. Unless they were executing a scripted sequence, which few ever actually did, or if they were attacking something, equally rare. Really brainless.
Well, in Oblivion, many characters have a bit more scripting, but that's all the smarter they are. And you can't make them be any different (well, you can, but it's a game mod; there are a couple of mods available that alter some behaviors--but you can also read that they may be "unbalancing"--if that's true, it means their control mechanism is flawed). In the towns, NPCs have houses they might go to, and then go to bed. You can actually see folks lying in bed; you can wake them for a conversation, but they will go back to bed when you finish. In the morning, they will walk to work. Ok, that's decent scripting, FAR better than Morrowind.
I hated having a sidekick character ever, in Morrowind, even just to escort someplace, because that NPC was still going to run towards a fight if one was available. So in order to do an escort properly, you'd have to talk to that NPC, and tell them "Wait here" and then go clear the route to the destination, then come back and escort safely, because if you didn't and a really difficult opponent was in the middle of the travel, your escorted NPC was going to run to fight that opponent, instead of letting you lead the fight or do it solo, or walk around the problem. One NPC I had to escort I was able to tell to wait, but then I was never able to get it to follow me to the delivery location--not even an option.
So your typical effort with any sort of sidekick was much more oriented around preventing them from doing something stupid--which would mean YOU have to run towards the fight, faster than the sidekick/escortee, which I seldom wanted to do.
Nothing much changed in Oblivion, the NPCs are just as stupid. Same exact thing happens. And the sidekick won't sneak when you do, or have any of your special skills. It'd be one thing if you could have a sidekick early, train them the same way you train, and have them sneak and not attack when you sneak and don't attack. (Neverwinter Nights is a little better about this, but not much.)
But that's not what happens. Conveniently, when you get the assignment about the Black Bow Bandits in Leyawiin, Mazorga the Orc says "I'll wait here until you say you're ready to go", so that you can go clear out most of the danger and then go back for her. Otherwise, since she doesn't sneak, your doing so won't accomplish much, she'll run into the fight in the cave and get overwhelmed--because there's no "I" in the NPC "AI".
I guess doing this well really does take an Advanced Degree (tm), and it seems no one over at Bethesda has one. GAH!
This is really bugging me at this point. I know already that I'm going to have additional tasks in the future in this game where I'm going to be part of a team where I am the only smart player, and the others will all get killed because they don't know how or when to be careful. Dungeon Siege was better about this in the you could at least click down a retreat path and your team would follow, and there were easily-changed control settings about the team's basic tactics; I don't remember them applying to summoned critters, but really, who cares what they do? At least with DS 2 you could put Healing Hands/Wind as an automatic spell, and not have to worry about it too much.
The other thing that bugs me and happens a lot more often (not too many sidekicks in Oblivion) is that when you summon a helper, that helper can't see opponents even if it is standing right next to them unless/until they move. So your summoned thing might not detect an opponent until its 30-second lifetime is almost over. GAH! I summoned it up close so it could attack immediately, not stand there waiting for some motion to detect. Granted, I'm the one with the Helmet of 100-ft life detection, but surely a summoned thing can detect the opponent that is 3 feet away? If I attack the thing they're standing next to, they see it right away, but that's exactly what I want to avoid.
I can create better NPC AI than this. Will the game let me? Do I even want to bother?
I ask because while you can define some NPC actions, if their decision-making/control scheme is inadequate, there's a good chance that there will be unintentional conflicts between actions/goals.
How this ought to work: a character should be able to have any number of goals, in various states, just as you do in your journal. They can be active to different extents, and there can always be background goals. Goal priority can change over time, sometimes in non-obvious ways. Example: a character could have a goal to eat twice a day, once in the morning around 9am, and once later around 7pm. The urgency of completing those goals would be low, depending on what else was going on, and there should be some time flexibility, so breakfast could be from 7am to 10 am, and dinner from 5pm to 9pm. There wouldn't be any real urgency about the meal goal until time was running out at the end of the day (figuring you can skip breakfast, but not dinner). The problem that could arise is if the character has a scripted behavior between 5pm and midnight, and violating it by going to eat breaks the script. This is where a more complex script control is needed, so that character can make a dynamic decision about eating. The script for eating would have to be lower priority than others, and a quest-related required activity would be higher than most others. Probably max priority is self-preservation, so that a character under attack focuses on battle. You can read more about this in various texbooks under "hierarchical planning"; there really is a lot of past work on this general topic.
If you play a while, you will see a few interesting behaviors, but not as many as you should. I've seen characters (just today, in fact) walk past a weapon, encounter a critter, run back for the weapon, pick it up, and use it on the critter (thus protecting me, albeit unintentionally, the critter was chasing me). That was clever. Saw one run down and kill a deer once, not sure why.
But what you don't see, for example, are NPCs healing themselves or each other. Opponents don't do this either; in one sense this is good, because it means that you can wear them down on an ongoing basis, and you can heal yourself while they cannot, giving you an edge, if you are evenly matched in a battle.
I have not yet investigated TES Construction Kit to find out what's possible. I'm going to have to. (later: well probably not, other games to play, not enough time to waste on figuring out this one if I'm not getting paid for it :)
I've read that in Half-life mods there are some very good squad behaviors, where opponents will take cover, support each other, execute group actions, etc. I'm pretty sure I'm a better squad leader than the default battle behaviors in Oblivion.
------- some months later ---------
I've started playing NeverWinter Nights 2 just after Thanksgiving. There are some seriously stupid behaviors in this, too, which are ultimately worse because the game requires you to have a large team the entire way through because of the quantities of opponents in groups (well, you could mostly play solo, but that's a guaranteed path to failure pretty quick).
Where the teammates are stupid:
1) they run towards fights. well, this isn't unusual, it seems. you can arrange to micro-manage your teammates, but I am not interested in doing that. I AM interested in telling them to stand still, stay behind me, etc. Not possible.
2) doorways are a disaster. entirely too often I have found that I have characters stuck in doorways, because I have a character that is blocking the doorway because it is being attacked and the one behind can't get through or help. This happens a lot.
3) they won't retreat when I do. When I run somewhere, I don't care what they are doing, I want the team to follow me. Always. No exceptions.
4) the NPC behavior is, in general, about equal to Morrowind. Most of your NPCs are doing the random bopping around town 24/7. Merchants are awake nonstop.
-------------
Where they are smarter:
1) the dialog trees are better all around, and the overall story is more complex. Morrowind had a complex story, TOO complex, I thought, and the "journal" did a lousy job of keeping you informed about what you needed to do. I didn't play for a while, forgot what I was up to, and ended up just stopping permanently (except for a couple of returns to test ideas).
-------------
I am going to be thrilled when I can play a game where the NPCs really exhibit intelligence (and no, I don't mean by playing in an MMO).
I'm available if someone wants to hire me to solve this problem. Please!
Friday, May 26, 2006
HDTV
Quite by accident I'm in the market for a new television. The old one "just quit". I'd really been hoping for another five years from it, to let HDTV technology settle down some, but no.
Televisions used to be simple things to evaluate: you picked them by size, and cost, and whether you wanted it to be a piece of furniture. Our last tv was a piece of furniture ("Console"), as had the previous one. It was clear at the time that CRTs were going away, and the console style was history--we bought probably the last one. It had already gotten stupid about its input, the coax had quit working 2-3 yrs ago, so we have been using composite-video input (red/yellow/white RCA cables).
Now, it seems you need an Advanced Degree (tm) to figure out what kind of tv to buy.And that's what we're here for.
There are four technologies where there used to be one (actually, CRT is still available, so that's five).
CRT: same old same old. you can get big CRTs, they work just like always, but they weigh multi-hundred pounds. Avoid.
DLP: Digital Light Processor. This is some funky semiconductor technology that actually dates back to the late 70s. There were demos of this just being shown internally at TI in the late 80s when I was working at TI. By applying microvoltages to what are tiny little mirrors on the surface of a semiconductor, they change shape and flex angle, reflecting light differently. So the tv has light bulb source, these mirrors (I don't know how many are on the chip, but it's a fair quantity), and then a rotating color wheel. Light from bulb reflects off the mirrors, through the color wheel (think of that old slowly rotating color wheel you'd see with a shiny christmas tree and it would change colors), onto the screen. The wheel spins about 10 thousand rpm. I've been told the next gen of tvs with DLP chips won't be using a color wheel, but I have not verified this. You'd figure eventually that thing wears out somehow. The minimum size on these seems to be 42 inches (just over a meter for the international readers).
LCD: a giant version of your thin/flat computer screen. The max size on these seems to be 40 inches right now. I was looking at 32, 37, and 40 inch units. These are good looking units.
Plasma: there's a charged plasma inside (plasma is a gas with electrons stripped off the atoms). Altering the charge applied from outside changes color and intensity. These units seems to start at 42 inches, and that's for the low-resolution versions. They all looked grainy to me, and the big ones are out of my price range. The color intensity of what you see is excellent--everyone likes that part. The old problem of early burnout is gone, I believe.
LCD Projection: A bulb is the light source, shines through several small LCDs (one per color), onto the screen. This is just like the little computer projector units, only larger, and self-contained instead of shining on your wall. The minimum size here seems to be 42 inches, to 70 or more.
There's also the really huge projection units that have been around for years. Not in my price range.
Think about what all inputs you need--there are rather too many of those as well, I think. Composite is the red/yellow/white trio you may already be using. Component is the other color combo, you might be using that, my impression is that this is better than composite. HDMI seems to be the newest one, but I think it's about to get replaced by something else soon. Then there's the antenna input, and the coax (analog cable) input, and maybe a PC/VGA input (play a computer game on the huge screen).
The next characteristic to think about is the signal resolution. CRT tvs are 480i. LCDs are 720p or 1080p; generally a 720p tv can display a 1080 signal (presumably by just dropping out pixels). Projection units are 720 or 1080, for both DLP and LCD. Plasmas tend to be the in-between EDTV. The "p" versus "i" means progressive or interlaced. Old tv is interlaced, it's not so good, and is the cause of weird flickering you see with fine horizontal lines. Progressive is better.
CRT tvs are: 640x480. EDTV is 840x620 or something like that; better, but really not worth your time. LCDs are 1280x720, or 1366x900 or something. High-res HDTV is 1900x1080.
So your best picture is going to be on the 1900x1080 screen with a full 1080 signal (and that 1080 is why the signal is called 1080). Of course, these cost more, but they are good looking. But you are going to have to pay a bit more for the content/signal. We decided against that.
Another concern for me was what about DVR? Right now, I have analog cable. It feeds the tv and my DVR unit, which has channel selection, converts analog into DV, goes right into my computer, where I can edit it down a little by cutting out commercials, and then burn a DVD. That thing isn't going to work if I switch to digital cable. Then I'd have to get the box, and pipe the coax output into my DVR unit. Not what I want to do.
In 2008, the tv broadcasters are required to switch over to HD broadcasts (I'm probably screwed re DVR at that point, having to buy something new). I presume that means 1080, but I don't know. My impression is that many are already broadcasting an HD signal on some other channel. I had hoped not be getting a new tv until after this had happened, but even then a lot of older stuff is still going to be CRT-resolution content, so you really want to be happy with how an older signal looks on the new tv. I've also read that you can probably receive those HD broadcast signals on a normal antenna, if you aren't going to go with digital cable--which we are not: higher cost, and we aren't interested in any of those other digital channels.
I really wanted to like the DLP units. There was a spec-wise nice unit available for $1600, with stand, but it just didn't look that good; seemed dark, real off-axis trouble. DLP screens seem to have trouble about off-axis image brightness: you really need to be watching them straight-on. At the almost last minute I saw a 1080 DLP unit that was in my price range, but it just didn't look that great; it seemed better than the others, and getting into 1080 right away would be good (ready for the future), I wasn't that impressed.
if Samsung offered a 3751 LCD unit, we'd have bought that--the 3251 and 4051 units look great, but 32 is smaller than I want to go, and the 4051 is out of my price range. We also liked a Philips 37 inch we saw, that was 2nd choice overall.
but we are going with the Sony KDFE 50A10 LCD projection unit. It looked best overall. Well, actually the 42A10 looked best, because it's 1280x720 at 42 inches, the 50A10 is 1280x720 at 50 inches--so it looks a little grainier. But overall these two looked best at the multiple signals we saw, and the online comments re both 42 and 50 were excellent.
And they're not too heavy about 75 pounds. The base/stand is about the same weight--you pretty much have to have one, and really for these two you need to get the matching stand, which costs about $300.
I recommend looking them over at a couple of different stores (because they'll have different signals they show, and different lighting). And check the online prices, and remember about the shipping cost, which will be around $200--which might make up the different between that price and your local store. and think about the extended warranty if you get a projection unit--the dirty little secret seems to be the unmentioned bulb life. My suspicion is that no one really knows what the lifetime is on the bulbs, and they aren't cheap (typically $200 or so, and you can't just buy them at Home Depot). And how long will they be in production? This worries my slightly.
Think about how much time you really spend in front of the tv, and whether you really want to spend the $ for a great big one. We have the tv on maybe two hours per day (depending of course on what's showing), and we really only watch a few channels: FoodTV, TCM, Spike (MXC)...I could swear there was another one, but maybe not. We do have plenty of DVDs, and older VCR tapes. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing Star Wars on a big screen: remastered high-res spaceships going kablooey on a big screen--that's what I'm talking about.
Televisions used to be simple things to evaluate: you picked them by size, and cost, and whether you wanted it to be a piece of furniture. Our last tv was a piece of furniture ("Console"), as had the previous one. It was clear at the time that CRTs were going away, and the console style was history--we bought probably the last one. It had already gotten stupid about its input, the coax had quit working 2-3 yrs ago, so we have been using composite-video input (red/yellow/white RCA cables).
Now, it seems you need an Advanced Degree (tm) to figure out what kind of tv to buy.And that's what we're here for.
There are four technologies where there used to be one (actually, CRT is still available, so that's five).
CRT: same old same old. you can get big CRTs, they work just like always, but they weigh multi-hundred pounds. Avoid.
DLP: Digital Light Processor. This is some funky semiconductor technology that actually dates back to the late 70s. There were demos of this just being shown internally at TI in the late 80s when I was working at TI. By applying microvoltages to what are tiny little mirrors on the surface of a semiconductor, they change shape and flex angle, reflecting light differently. So the tv has light bulb source, these mirrors (I don't know how many are on the chip, but it's a fair quantity), and then a rotating color wheel. Light from bulb reflects off the mirrors, through the color wheel (think of that old slowly rotating color wheel you'd see with a shiny christmas tree and it would change colors), onto the screen. The wheel spins about 10 thousand rpm. I've been told the next gen of tvs with DLP chips won't be using a color wheel, but I have not verified this. You'd figure eventually that thing wears out somehow. The minimum size on these seems to be 42 inches (just over a meter for the international readers).
LCD: a giant version of your thin/flat computer screen. The max size on these seems to be 40 inches right now. I was looking at 32, 37, and 40 inch units. These are good looking units.
Plasma: there's a charged plasma inside (plasma is a gas with electrons stripped off the atoms). Altering the charge applied from outside changes color and intensity. These units seems to start at 42 inches, and that's for the low-resolution versions. They all looked grainy to me, and the big ones are out of my price range. The color intensity of what you see is excellent--everyone likes that part. The old problem of early burnout is gone, I believe.
LCD Projection: A bulb is the light source, shines through several small LCDs (one per color), onto the screen. This is just like the little computer projector units, only larger, and self-contained instead of shining on your wall. The minimum size here seems to be 42 inches, to 70 or more.
There's also the really huge projection units that have been around for years. Not in my price range.
Think about what all inputs you need--there are rather too many of those as well, I think. Composite is the red/yellow/white trio you may already be using. Component is the other color combo, you might be using that, my impression is that this is better than composite. HDMI seems to be the newest one, but I think it's about to get replaced by something else soon. Then there's the antenna input, and the coax (analog cable) input, and maybe a PC/VGA input (play a computer game on the huge screen).
The next characteristic to think about is the signal resolution. CRT tvs are 480i. LCDs are 720p or 1080p; generally a 720p tv can display a 1080 signal (presumably by just dropping out pixels). Projection units are 720 or 1080, for both DLP and LCD. Plasmas tend to be the in-between EDTV. The "p" versus "i" means progressive or interlaced. Old tv is interlaced, it's not so good, and is the cause of weird flickering you see with fine horizontal lines. Progressive is better.
CRT tvs are: 640x480. EDTV is 840x620 or something like that; better, but really not worth your time. LCDs are 1280x720, or 1366x900 or something. High-res HDTV is 1900x1080.
So your best picture is going to be on the 1900x1080 screen with a full 1080 signal (and that 1080 is why the signal is called 1080). Of course, these cost more, but they are good looking. But you are going to have to pay a bit more for the content/signal. We decided against that.
Another concern for me was what about DVR? Right now, I have analog cable. It feeds the tv and my DVR unit, which has channel selection, converts analog into DV, goes right into my computer, where I can edit it down a little by cutting out commercials, and then burn a DVD. That thing isn't going to work if I switch to digital cable. Then I'd have to get the box, and pipe the coax output into my DVR unit. Not what I want to do.
In 2008, the tv broadcasters are required to switch over to HD broadcasts (I'm probably screwed re DVR at that point, having to buy something new). I presume that means 1080, but I don't know. My impression is that many are already broadcasting an HD signal on some other channel. I had hoped not be getting a new tv until after this had happened, but even then a lot of older stuff is still going to be CRT-resolution content, so you really want to be happy with how an older signal looks on the new tv. I've also read that you can probably receive those HD broadcast signals on a normal antenna, if you aren't going to go with digital cable--which we are not: higher cost, and we aren't interested in any of those other digital channels.
I really wanted to like the DLP units. There was a spec-wise nice unit available for $1600, with stand, but it just didn't look that good; seemed dark, real off-axis trouble. DLP screens seem to have trouble about off-axis image brightness: you really need to be watching them straight-on. At the almost last minute I saw a 1080 DLP unit that was in my price range, but it just didn't look that great; it seemed better than the others, and getting into 1080 right away would be good (ready for the future), I wasn't that impressed.
if Samsung offered a 3751 LCD unit, we'd have bought that--the 3251 and 4051 units look great, but 32 is smaller than I want to go, and the 4051 is out of my price range. We also liked a Philips 37 inch we saw, that was 2nd choice overall.
but we are going with the Sony KDFE 50A10 LCD projection unit. It looked best overall. Well, actually the 42A10 looked best, because it's 1280x720 at 42 inches, the 50A10 is 1280x720 at 50 inches--so it looks a little grainier. But overall these two looked best at the multiple signals we saw, and the online comments re both 42 and 50 were excellent.
And they're not too heavy about 75 pounds. The base/stand is about the same weight--you pretty much have to have one, and really for these two you need to get the matching stand, which costs about $300.
I recommend looking them over at a couple of different stores (because they'll have different signals they show, and different lighting). And check the online prices, and remember about the shipping cost, which will be around $200--which might make up the different between that price and your local store. and think about the extended warranty if you get a projection unit--the dirty little secret seems to be the unmentioned bulb life. My suspicion is that no one really knows what the lifetime is on the bulbs, and they aren't cheap (typically $200 or so, and you can't just buy them at Home Depot). And how long will they be in production? This worries my slightly.
Think about how much time you really spend in front of the tv, and whether you really want to spend the $ for a great big one. We have the tv on maybe two hours per day (depending of course on what's showing), and we really only watch a few channels: FoodTV, TCM, Spike (MXC)...I could swear there was another one, but maybe not. We do have plenty of DVDs, and older VCR tapes. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing Star Wars on a big screen: remastered high-res spaceships going kablooey on a big screen--that's what I'm talking about.
Friday, May 12, 2006
Having covered more Oblivion territory...
btw, I'm at sneak 100.
Something funky happened. I had gone through Fatback Cave, I did a lot of sneak, bypassing the Goblin warlords. No interest in taking them on, they don't carry anything interesting (except one), so I just grabbed loot in boxes. I killed all the goblin shamans, they at least have something interesting. Then I left.
Later I came back, and lo and behold, the cave is repopulated with loot and goblins, including the two guards outside, and the footplate-based trap is reset.
Huh? I thought once you cleared a place it stayed that way. Maybe a rat or two returns, but an entire group, AND the chests are refilled? Wow, and nifty! Maybe this means I can go back through other places where I got really neat loot. Not that you can sell it for anything much, or buy anything interesting. The only things I've found for sale that I thought were interesting are spells I can't use (3-400 magicka range). There's the very occasional special weapon for sale, but I already have better stuff. This was true in Morrowind too. Interesting weapons seem rare at merchants.
Money seems of limited value in Oblivion. Not much of great interest that you can buy. Spells, enchantments. Not something you do often, and as you can't get rid of spells afterward, I don't buy many; can't remember which ones I really like--and once I replaced "Ease Burden" with "Pack Mule" I'd like to forget "EB". Can't.
Alright, you can buy training, but since you have to level-up to get another five training slots, this isn't too exciting, and can't happen very fast.
Dungeon Siege got this right--merchants (of which there weren't many) had mountains of stuff, huge variability in all categories.
You will need/want to make yourself a ring of night-eye (you only need a petty soul for this). Makes caves/etc be lit up like daytime. Hard to beat that. And you want something that has long-range life-detection. And an enchanted silver blade, for hitting undead things like ghosts and will-o-wisps. and you need to make yourself an equivalent to Morrowind's "Soul Drinker". I think you can't make a jinkblade, so you really want to make your Mage's Guild staff be one of paralyze. Although that's not perfect either. I think not everyone can be paralyzed.
The non-availability of more advanced weapons regularly is pretty annoying. I'm still working with the Honorblade, which you can get pretty early, when it's a fabulous weapon. Many levels later, it's a little better (I think it starts out around 16 hp, 15 levels later I'm up to 20 hp with it--I ought to have a least a 30-hp weapon by now, maybe 40).
Something funky happened. I had gone through Fatback Cave, I did a lot of sneak, bypassing the Goblin warlords. No interest in taking them on, they don't carry anything interesting (except one), so I just grabbed loot in boxes. I killed all the goblin shamans, they at least have something interesting. Then I left.
Later I came back, and lo and behold, the cave is repopulated with loot and goblins, including the two guards outside, and the footplate-based trap is reset.
Huh? I thought once you cleared a place it stayed that way. Maybe a rat or two returns, but an entire group, AND the chests are refilled? Wow, and nifty! Maybe this means I can go back through other places where I got really neat loot. Not that you can sell it for anything much, or buy anything interesting. The only things I've found for sale that I thought were interesting are spells I can't use (3-400 magicka range). There's the very occasional special weapon for sale, but I already have better stuff. This was true in Morrowind too. Interesting weapons seem rare at merchants.
Money seems of limited value in Oblivion. Not much of great interest that you can buy. Spells, enchantments. Not something you do often, and as you can't get rid of spells afterward, I don't buy many; can't remember which ones I really like--and once I replaced "Ease Burden" with "Pack Mule" I'd like to forget "EB". Can't.
Alright, you can buy training, but since you have to level-up to get another five training slots, this isn't too exciting, and can't happen very fast.
Dungeon Siege got this right--merchants (of which there weren't many) had mountains of stuff, huge variability in all categories.
You will need/want to make yourself a ring of night-eye (you only need a petty soul for this). Makes caves/etc be lit up like daytime. Hard to beat that. And you want something that has long-range life-detection. And an enchanted silver blade, for hitting undead things like ghosts and will-o-wisps. and you need to make yourself an equivalent to Morrowind's "Soul Drinker". I think you can't make a jinkblade, so you really want to make your Mage's Guild staff be one of paralyze. Although that's not perfect either. I think not everyone can be paralyzed.
The non-availability of more advanced weapons regularly is pretty annoying. I'm still working with the Honorblade, which you can get pretty early, when it's a fabulous weapon. Many levels later, it's a little better (I think it starts out around 16 hp, 15 levels later I'm up to 20 hp with it--I ought to have a least a 30-hp weapon by now, maybe 40).
Monday, May 01, 2006
Addendum to Morrowind vs Oblivion
One of the things you find out quick in these games is that you reach a point, perhaps *too* early, where there's more loot around than you can carry. In "M", you will get access to the combination of "Mark", Almsivi/Divine Intervention, and "Recall". "Mark" creates a designated map location where you are standing (i.e., mark my location). Intervention teleports you to a Temple or wherever location (same one each time). Recall teleports you back to the "Mark" spot. Once you go get the game mod that puts a merchant at the various temple/etc locations you jump to, then you're all set. You grab all the loot you can, and overload yourself as much as you want, cast "Mark", call Intervention, sell everything, and cast Recall, to go back for more stuff or continue on from where you were. Works great, once you have the game mod. Otherwise, you can jump out with the loot, and drop, and go back, but you still would have to return and carry it all to a merchant, thus the need for the mod.
Far as I can tell, "O" doesn't have such a thing. Maybe I just haven't found it. Hope that happens soon...in Fort Grief and Veyond Cave, I had seriously good loot, very heavy, I had to make 3 or 4 trips back and forth to get it all dragged home and sold or stored. A bit time-consuming. I'd be happy if I could designate a single warp-to point, like my house (if I had one) or a favorite merchant. But because I don't, I don't really both with low-value loot. In "M" anything less than 1000 gold I don't even look at; I'm carrying about 1.5 mil, have another 2-3 mil in storage, what do I want with low-dollar stuff? I can make potions if I need to, but I don't, since I enchanted my armor to recover just about everything. The big gold is more for buying expensive enchantments.
This would also be valuable inside the Oblivion Gates. I was whacking plenty of Dremora in there, and they'd mostly have maces. Not particularly valuable, and too heavy to carry more than one of, but if I could jump out and drop them somewhere and deal with selling them later, and then jump back, I'd be willing and able to keep them. Normally when you grab the Sigil Stone at the eand of a Gate, the whole area is destroyed and becomes unavailable--and loot left behind is gone.
[Where this wouldn't work, and the reason I think "O" doesn't have this capability anywhere: the quest where you go to Fort Grief to rescue a guy is dependent on your just not being able to get out other than by completing the task. If you could do Almsivi Intervention escapes, the FG task becomes far less dangerous.]
I haven't investigated whether or not if I bribe a merchant upwards on friendliness how much better the prices get in my favor. It ought to work like that.
As others have written elsewhere, when you level up, other critters get stronger, and you get different critters.
Far as I can tell, "O" doesn't have such a thing. Maybe I just haven't found it. Hope that happens soon...in Fort Grief and Veyond Cave, I had seriously good loot, very heavy, I had to make 3 or 4 trips back and forth to get it all dragged home and sold or stored. A bit time-consuming. I'd be happy if I could designate a single warp-to point, like my house (if I had one) or a favorite merchant. But because I don't, I don't really both with low-value loot. In "M" anything less than 1000 gold I don't even look at; I'm carrying about 1.5 mil, have another 2-3 mil in storage, what do I want with low-dollar stuff? I can make potions if I need to, but I don't, since I enchanted my armor to recover just about everything. The big gold is more for buying expensive enchantments.
This would also be valuable inside the Oblivion Gates. I was whacking plenty of Dremora in there, and they'd mostly have maces. Not particularly valuable, and too heavy to carry more than one of, but if I could jump out and drop them somewhere and deal with selling them later, and then jump back, I'd be willing and able to keep them. Normally when you grab the Sigil Stone at the eand of a Gate, the whole area is destroyed and becomes unavailable--and loot left behind is gone.
[Where this wouldn't work, and the reason I think "O" doesn't have this capability anywhere: the quest where you go to Fort Grief to rescue a guy is dependent on your just not being able to get out other than by completing the task. If you could do Almsivi Intervention escapes, the FG task becomes far less dangerous.]
I haven't investigated whether or not if I bribe a merchant upwards on friendliness how much better the prices get in my favor. It ought to work like that.
As others have written elsewhere, when you level up, other critters get stronger, and you get different critters.
Monday, April 24, 2006
Comparing Morrowind and Oblivion
I've played Oblivion for about 210 hours (it was almost the only thing I did the first 3 weeks I had it). I played Morrowind a lot longer, without "finishing" it, although I did nearly everything...or so I thought. In order to do a better job with "O", I went back to "M" for some refresher experience, and because I'm not sure about some "O" behaviors.
One of M's strengths is also a weakness...there's so much you can do that it's easy to get really lost. In going back to it I was reminded by looking at the world map that there was really a lot of territory I had not explored. A lot. I have the official guide book, looked back at it, and I had been marking each task as I finished things, and there was really a lot of THAT that I had not done either (and things I hadn't marked).
M seems a larger map than O. Seems to be more going on in M, too. Anyway. I'm level 71, I've done about half of the main story line, just short of getting Moon-and-Star. been through Ghostgate a bit (twice actually, seemed something went wrong in gameplay where Almsivi Intervention stopped working [?!], I had to back up; I think that wasn't the prob, more that a reboot was needed). I've got Keening already, and had Sunder, but of course not Wraithguard. Not even sure I can finish the main story, looking at the book. Because you can do so many things, and do lots of them out of order, I may have done thing already that are players in later tasks, and sold the loot without knowing I'd need it. and I darn sure don't remember who I sold what to...if I was willing to go back and hunt for things, I could find the buyers, since they don't lose the things you sold them.
O looks like it has much the same flavor, and possibilities, except that there seems less likelihood of mishandling the interesting items, there seem to be fewer. and O has a better journal mechanism, in that it keeps individual quests separated. M's journal had them all merged, no way I'm going to try to scroll back through that to find scattered individual entries. and O has a map marker in place for the next location you need to go to or NPC you need to talk to on whatever is you current primary task. This obviates the desire I had to be able to type my own entries, because I couldn't keep track of things in M.
Things I discovered/learned in M: enchanting is critical. once you are finding grand soul gems, and can soul-trap either ascended sleepers or golden saints, you need to be doing so, and then you need to enchant your armor with constant effects, maybe your weapons (there are plenty of enchanted weapons around already), and some rings. what I consider critical enchantments: restore attribute, especially strength; restore health, which means you don't have to sleep again or be drinking health potions; ring of night-eye (see in the dark) is phenomenally valuable--those otherwise really dark caves are now lit up like mid-afternoon sun so you can cruise right through them; ring of invisibility seemed like a good idea, but I can't tell yet; rings of summong look important, too, although not all that often--just once in a while when you need a distraction, like taking on Dagoth Ur, and it turns out that if you use a golden saint to enchant an exquisite ring, you can get two or three different critters on the same cast--a veritable army. Once you are starting to pick up the really valuable daedric items off dead things, and can get them sold reasonably easily, buy as much training as you can find. it's WAY faster than actually doing the work. I didn't find potion-making to be all that exciting, as you primarily want to make health potions, and once I had armor enchanted (actually, twas an "exquisite pants") to restore health, I stopped bothing to make any potions at all. Ultimately I was holding on to a lot of weapons I didn't need, all those glass swords had been useful earlier, but once you have Skull Crusher and Chrysamere, the only ones you still want are a jinkblade and Soul Drinker. The rest are just dead weight. If you're doing a lot of magic, you want to keep some cheap spells in the front, so that you can just cast them repeatedly while you walk/run, thus leveling-up on them all the time (this is also true for O). Once you reach 100 on them, you can stop; same is true for jumping, and swimming, running, etc, except that you almost always want to be running. Sneak and lockpick are critical things to have way high (true for O also). It might seem goofy to be jumping all the time, but practice makes perfect, and that will be valuable eventually.
Things I've learned in Oblivion: I spend more time making potions in the beginning, I hope I'll be able to enchant my armor with health restore; you can't wear pants/shirt AND armor in Oblivion, which bites, because you could do this in Morrowind, and you could enchant the pants/shirt, too. Always go into sneak when you open a door not inside one of your guild houses. Sneak is really valuable here, too. You can do a lot of it extremely early (during the training exercise where you follow the king, and the "do sneak here" message shows up, the critter you are sneaking behind will never turn around, so you can go back and forth for as long as you can stand; I think it will take 3-4 hours to reach level 100, but it's certainly worth taking the one hour needed to reach level 50). Leveling-up seems to have a perverse dis-incentive: your opponents get harder everywhere to match you, so you can't run from one problem, then come back later after gaining 5-10 levels and lay some smack down.
Once you finish the first Oblivion Gate, your next couple of little tasks will get you a free horse. This means faster travel around the map, but it also means that *you* don't get any level-up skill improvements as you would from running and jumping.
Unlike Dungeon Siege, your summoned critters don't accrue attack points to you as they do damage. So while they are good as distractions, you still have to do a lot of hitting to get points.
There's a sort of perverse dis-incentive to level-up in "O". In "M", the opponents you encounter are fixed--you go to location X and it will contain certain creatures and loot, whether you are level 3 or level 30. In "O", you go to a particular location, the opponents' abilities and loot are dependent on your level--so while Veyond Cave contains Argonians no matter what, if you are level 5 they aren't too strong, and carry steel daggers; if you are level 20 they are fairly strong and carry glass daggers. So at level 5, the loot is not very interesting--you are going to top-out on that pretty early, and you won't get wealthy at all, whereas at level 20, Veyond Cave netted me about 10 glass daggers, some enchanted, and other interesting items, worth several thousand gold. (That might be more glass daggers than I ever even saw in "M".) Fort Grief was even better, two complete sets of glass armor and one complete daedric armor, worth about 35k.
I had been avoiding level-up in order to have an easier time of things, but that's not doing me any good, it turns out. Sure, fights were easier, but loot was nearly worthless. And it does take some serious gold to buy a house, for example, which you really will want to do, because that's where you stash things you aren't willing/ready to sell. You can leave it out on the floor somewhere like in your guild-hall, it appears not to go away over time, but you can't put things in crates.
I've put in 230 hours on this...when did I buy it? I've stayed up all night more than once...
One of M's strengths is also a weakness...there's so much you can do that it's easy to get really lost. In going back to it I was reminded by looking at the world map that there was really a lot of territory I had not explored. A lot. I have the official guide book, looked back at it, and I had been marking each task as I finished things, and there was really a lot of THAT that I had not done either (and things I hadn't marked).
M seems a larger map than O. Seems to be more going on in M, too. Anyway. I'm level 71, I've done about half of the main story line, just short of getting Moon-and-Star. been through Ghostgate a bit (twice actually, seemed something went wrong in gameplay where Almsivi Intervention stopped working [?!], I had to back up; I think that wasn't the prob, more that a reboot was needed). I've got Keening already, and had Sunder, but of course not Wraithguard. Not even sure I can finish the main story, looking at the book. Because you can do so many things, and do lots of them out of order, I may have done thing already that are players in later tasks, and sold the loot without knowing I'd need it. and I darn sure don't remember who I sold what to...if I was willing to go back and hunt for things, I could find the buyers, since they don't lose the things you sold them.
O looks like it has much the same flavor, and possibilities, except that there seems less likelihood of mishandling the interesting items, there seem to be fewer. and O has a better journal mechanism, in that it keeps individual quests separated. M's journal had them all merged, no way I'm going to try to scroll back through that to find scattered individual entries. and O has a map marker in place for the next location you need to go to or NPC you need to talk to on whatever is you current primary task. This obviates the desire I had to be able to type my own entries, because I couldn't keep track of things in M.
Things I discovered/learned in M: enchanting is critical. once you are finding grand soul gems, and can soul-trap either ascended sleepers or golden saints, you need to be doing so, and then you need to enchant your armor with constant effects, maybe your weapons (there are plenty of enchanted weapons around already), and some rings. what I consider critical enchantments: restore attribute, especially strength; restore health, which means you don't have to sleep again or be drinking health potions; ring of night-eye (see in the dark) is phenomenally valuable--those otherwise really dark caves are now lit up like mid-afternoon sun so you can cruise right through them; ring of invisibility seemed like a good idea, but I can't tell yet; rings of summong look important, too, although not all that often--just once in a while when you need a distraction, like taking on Dagoth Ur, and it turns out that if you use a golden saint to enchant an exquisite ring, you can get two or three different critters on the same cast--a veritable army. Once you are starting to pick up the really valuable daedric items off dead things, and can get them sold reasonably easily, buy as much training as you can find. it's WAY faster than actually doing the work. I didn't find potion-making to be all that exciting, as you primarily want to make health potions, and once I had armor enchanted (actually, twas an "exquisite pants") to restore health, I stopped bothing to make any potions at all. Ultimately I was holding on to a lot of weapons I didn't need, all those glass swords had been useful earlier, but once you have Skull Crusher and Chrysamere, the only ones you still want are a jinkblade and Soul Drinker. The rest are just dead weight. If you're doing a lot of magic, you want to keep some cheap spells in the front, so that you can just cast them repeatedly while you walk/run, thus leveling-up on them all the time (this is also true for O). Once you reach 100 on them, you can stop; same is true for jumping, and swimming, running, etc, except that you almost always want to be running. Sneak and lockpick are critical things to have way high (true for O also). It might seem goofy to be jumping all the time, but practice makes perfect, and that will be valuable eventually.
Things I've learned in Oblivion: I spend more time making potions in the beginning, I hope I'll be able to enchant my armor with health restore; you can't wear pants/shirt AND armor in Oblivion, which bites, because you could do this in Morrowind, and you could enchant the pants/shirt, too. Always go into sneak when you open a door not inside one of your guild houses. Sneak is really valuable here, too. You can do a lot of it extremely early (during the training exercise where you follow the king, and the "do sneak here" message shows up, the critter you are sneaking behind will never turn around, so you can go back and forth for as long as you can stand; I think it will take 3-4 hours to reach level 100, but it's certainly worth taking the one hour needed to reach level 50). Leveling-up seems to have a perverse dis-incentive: your opponents get harder everywhere to match you, so you can't run from one problem, then come back later after gaining 5-10 levels and lay some smack down.
Once you finish the first Oblivion Gate, your next couple of little tasks will get you a free horse. This means faster travel around the map, but it also means that *you* don't get any level-up skill improvements as you would from running and jumping.
Unlike Dungeon Siege, your summoned critters don't accrue attack points to you as they do damage. So while they are good as distractions, you still have to do a lot of hitting to get points.
There's a sort of perverse dis-incentive to level-up in "O". In "M", the opponents you encounter are fixed--you go to location X and it will contain certain creatures and loot, whether you are level 3 or level 30. In "O", you go to a particular location, the opponents' abilities and loot are dependent on your level--so while Veyond Cave contains Argonians no matter what, if you are level 5 they aren't too strong, and carry steel daggers; if you are level 20 they are fairly strong and carry glass daggers. So at level 5, the loot is not very interesting--you are going to top-out on that pretty early, and you won't get wealthy at all, whereas at level 20, Veyond Cave netted me about 10 glass daggers, some enchanted, and other interesting items, worth several thousand gold. (That might be more glass daggers than I ever even saw in "M".) Fort Grief was even better, two complete sets of glass armor and one complete daedric armor, worth about 35k.
I had been avoiding level-up in order to have an easier time of things, but that's not doing me any good, it turns out. Sure, fights were easier, but loot was nearly worthless. And it does take some serious gold to buy a house, for example, which you really will want to do, because that's where you stash things you aren't willing/ready to sell. You can leave it out on the floor somewhere like in your guild-hall, it appears not to go away over time, but you can't put things in crates.
I've put in 230 hours on this...when did I buy it? I've stayed up all night more than once...
Friday, April 21, 2006
A.D. in new technologies
Seems like doing a blog is now a thing one must do, so Hyde University is beginning one. Various advanced topics will be presented here from time to time.
Most blogs seem like loud rants against one thing or another, or trivial natter about the daily grind. Not here. Hyde U's blog will be about somewhat more interesting things, and no rants or trivia.
Most blogs seem like loud rants against one thing or another, or trivial natter about the daily grind. Not here. Hyde U's blog will be about somewhat more interesting things, and no rants or trivia.
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