Guild Wars etc

I had the opportunity to get a copy of Guild Wars for $10 after TG over at Best Buy. I did NOT go to their Midnight Madness sale (you know, where you have to go over there at midnight to get in line for the 4 am opening).

(This year I went to Office Depot, arriving at 5.30 for the 6am opening, 25 people ahead of me, where I was able to get a 24" LCD monitor, 1900x1200, for $280--oh is that nice. One bad pixel, stuck on green.)

After Office Depot, I went to BB to see how things looked, and saw that they had GW for $10, but the checkout line was at least 200 people long, so I went home. Later in the afternoon I went back and bought it. The installer was reasonably fast, but of course the first thing it wanted to do was 600 MB of updates. Hope my ISP doesn't object to these massive downloads...in under a week I've already had two more software updates downloaded, too. (This is just the original game, GOTY edition, but no expansions.)

So what's GW like? Well, it doesn't have a monthly charge, which works for me. Entropia didn't either, but it did have a business model aimed at making money for the developers, and the game was nearly opaque. GW doesn't have a business model like that at all--you buy the game, you play until ArenaNet/NCSoft shuts it all down in a few years (which you know they will at some point).

GW is Dungeon Siege 2 as MMO, only not as well done. Like Oblivion, the "Economy" isn't very interesting...not much you can spend money on that is worth spending money on. You battle monsters, they drop loot, you can't carry much so you have to leave things on the ground as you travel, because you can't run back to town and sell--that results in the monsters all being respawned. At least with DS2, you could run back and sell, and most of the monsters would not have respawned. In DS 1 there was no respawning at all, so it was easy to run back to sell, and there were probably things worth buying.

There's the "Crafting" opportunities, but they aren't that interesting, although that was how I got better armor-rating clothes.

DS 2 had better visuals overall, and better looking characters (although not equivalently customizable, but really, how valuable is that?) and gear.

That said, GW is pretty dang nice at 1900x1200. And it does run, unlike a couple of other recent games (FEAR and Bioshock). You don't get a larger field of view (what I would have liked), but you get a lot of extra space to push subwindows (like inventory, tasks) off into.

I've been playing for a few days, and am at level 10. You can get to level 7 by yourself, without much trouble (I did get killed and resurrected a couple of times). GW gives you a little more camera control than DS 1 or 2, but that doesn't amount to much other than being able to look uphill. Sometimes I found myself with the camera aimed somewhere and I couldn't see what was going on at all.

GW has a lot more going on in terms of tasks/quests you can do, but they all have the flaw of "Mr X asks you to do Y, and it's far away, and when you're done you have to go back to Mr X to get the reward" -- which can get tiresome. You can do a partial "fast travel" in GW, but Morrowind had the best deal there. Not all places can be fast-traveled to, and if you have to go the Location A twice, you will have to whack the same monsters each time. Well, that's ok if you are getting more XP each time, but eventually that stops, you are level-wise too far above creature Z but you still have to kill it. The 10th or 15th time you have to whack the same bunch of monsters is is REALLY old.

It's a lot less clear about your weapon damage and armor rating than DS 1|2. I really don't know what I have.

One interesting thing: in the opening "campaign" (i.e., "pre-searing"), the opponents are fairly stupid and work alone. "Post-searing", the opponents work together, and seem to be grouped in small squads, and if there's a cluster of sorts, when one is attacked the others all run over to help. Your 'bot henchmen are fairly weak, tho, I seem to always get Level 3 teammates, altho my "pet" is close behind me. (OK, this seems location specific, if I select teammates in Piken Square, they are level 6, but in Ascalon City they are level 3; you get to Yak's Bend and they are level 8, so presumably that continues to rise further through the game--but those levels are not sufficient to get you through the game).

Possibly the worst aspect of the game: if you get wiped out a couple of times, you have to go back to town to get a recharge, because your max health has been reduced, then you have to go back through all the same areas you already went through, kill the same monsters again, etc. If you have to do this a couple of times, you get sloppy and in too big a hurry and get wiped out again. My tolerance for this "do it all over again" routine is not too high.

And also weird: I seem to have found myself repeating a couple of missions. No idea why. I'm not objecting to the XP, but I'm beyond where the kills get my anything...I'd have thought that once done, formal missions could not be repeated. It turns out that most have "secondary missions" for 1000 XP, but you can't always go back to do them. You can if you restart the mission and had not received the secondary mission before; I was successful at that once, and not successful another time (turned out I had received the mission, and the NPC who gave it was gone the 2nd time). And you really have to be careful about picking up something a mission target might drop. Twice I've had to go back and redo a mission because I forgot to grab the item.


Visually there are some problems: The worst, I think, is that there are clipping issues. You can run right through other people or monsters, which means that you can't really play this in first-person view, because you might standing at the same ground x/y as the monster--or at least close enough for it to not be visible, then you don't know what you are swinging your sword at. And then you can't see your weapon either, so you don't really know where you're aiming. This would be relatively easily solved by having all characters have the equivalent stand-off distance as inanimate objects force on you to go around. It's really hard to select a target to hit when you are inside its 3D model and can't see it.

When you are on ground where the elevation varies a lot (or on a big monitor), you can all too easily see how the texture images for the rectangular segments get stretched. It'd be nice if they were more jpeg-ish, where they could scale better. Or to have more detailed textures for use on bigger monitors. Kinda like the port of Quake 1 into the Quake 2 engine, where the textures got doubled in resolution. Or you need to show a lot wider field of view.


and of course the bots run on Artificial Stupidity, just like everywhere else. Dungeon Siege did that better too--they'd do what I told them to do with less tendency to run into fights.



(only slightly related: Google for "Artificial Stupidity" -- some of the results are pretty funny)

more free online music

This is a fabulous site: Wolfgang's Vault

you have probably never heard of or seen it. apparently the creator(s) somehow have access to all of Bill Graham's concert recordings from Fillmore East/West and Winterland. (Bill's birth name was Wolfgang)

so this website is how you get to listen to them all. It is an unbelievable collection of absolutely classic performances, a few of which have been released on CD in the past, and are known masterpieces (i.e., Allman Bros at Fillmore East).

there is of course some junk on there, but the things that are great are superb. The concerts play as flash-movies, so you can't just grab an mp3 file to download. A few are available for purchase, I don't know what file format you end up with. If you can rip an audio stream, that's likely to be a better approach.

Virtual World "games"

Having had a reason to look at Virtual World tools/games just recently (see "Change How We Teach"), I signed up for "Entropia Universe" because it's free. 2nd Life is free, too, but I tried this one first.

And it's just as bad as you might expect from something that costs nothing. I found it well-nigh unplayable, because the UI view and position jumped around like you wouldn't believe. I was trying to run, and it was like being John Cleese running up to the castle where he rescues the "maiden" in Holy Grail--I kept going back to a previous positions every couple of seconds...if I tried to turn, the camera view kept jumping back like I was rotating 90 degrees and then warping back where I started. This was intolerable.

The first time I was running it, things were fine, but that might have been time-of-day based, because it was at about 11pm EST. The really bad jumpiness was about 6pm EST, so I can imagine it being server-traffic/comm-delay/ping-time trouble. Not a good sign for a tool/game that wants to be taken seriously.

I'll try this again late tonight to see if time-of-day really does make a diff, but if it continues to be jumpy, it'll be time for "Add/Remove Programs". And then on to another one.

I have a project I'd like to try, but it necessitates having a good tool that can handle thousands of users/players simultaneously. It would run on a fiber-based network, so low ping would be the case all the time.

Several years ago I had a look at some other variation of this, an online 3D tool that one could make a game from, I do not remember the name. I recall it as something you could not actually do anything inside of, just run around, so all you saw were characters running and jumping.

Entropia seems like a cheap version of Oblivion, in which you can play a merchant as well as the main character. Otherwise, it's the same sort of thing only not as well done. You can collect things you find, kill critters (perhaps for loot), and sell things in town. From which you might buy weapons and armor. And you can learn to make things you could sell.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but: B-O-R-I-N-G. Surely there's something better...

------

Later: I rebooted PC, and restarted. The bad jumpiness went away, but it was still uninteresting. So I deleted it. I don't have time for this...

Change how we teach

"We have to change how we teach because they have changed how they learn."

Phrase coined by me, on Nov 5, 2007.

This was a result of some discussion about using Virtual Worlds as training tools. It arose after an hour+ of discussion about VW-as-training, and someone saying a few things about how kids from little up to 22 or so have their brains getting wired differently because of early and continuous exposure to computers and electronic gadgets.

Virtual Worlds are implemented as something like a computer game, a la Oblivion (see other posts for thoughts on that game), or Second Life, which you can read about in the dead-tree newspapers.

I'm thinking this is a good idea, but it will of course not be trivial to implement such training. It will grow cheaper and more powerful over time, but at the moment, it ain't. Comparison: look at the credits list of names at the back of the Oblivion game book, and look at the credits list at the end of a mid-size Hollywood movie. Those lists are comparable in terms of number of people, and if you were to compare against a big sci-fi movie, there's probably an equivalent amount of CG production work AND TIME involved. Some big games now take large teams multiple years to create, refine, test.

So I'm writing a proposal about making a virtual world example of the "new campus" for a new building/etc as a demo, with the outer edges being the roads outside campus, and including parking spaces, walkways into the buildings, the exterior and interior of the buildings, and how to get everywhere inside. You'd be able to find offices, classrooms, the auditorium, restrooms, cafeteria/food-court, etc.

An interesting variant on this time is 3D PDF. If you have Acrobat Reader 7 or 8, click HERE to see an interesting example. This does not do the interactive drive-through I want, but it's a possible way to start from the 3D CAD model. Apparently there is a tool available that will take a SketchUp drawing and make a 3D PDF from it...which would be very interesting. Personally I don't like SketchUp, I was able to bend a rectangle into a pretzel in less than 60 seconds when I first test-drove it a year ago, so I threw it out immediately. But the general approach is the right concept.

With the right kind of fly/walk-through, the relocation from the current campus to new campus (which will involve the entire org) could be a much smoother episode.

And you could imagine adapting this process into teaching a variety of other things. And that new faculty and students are going to expect it as a standard approach...best to lead rather than follow, if the effort can be undertaken at reasonable cost.

All part of the "we need to teach differently" because "they learn differently"...which basically means that chalkboard and flipcharts need to go away, even if that means the teachers have to get replaced, too.

That said, there are undoubtedly things that continue to need to be learned face-to-face, but there are probably plenty of things that don't, and can have some automation work done.

One of the exciting things about Second Life is that you the user can create your own content, kinda like the web, and can use it immediately, and others can see it immediately. If this creation process is easy enough, more folks will do it.

I haven't figured out how that fits into the new campus idea, but suppose that Hyde U instructors could also have a presence in "their office" in the model, and you could voice-chat with them (or at least IM) through the VW? Would that encourage content creation? Do classes evolve from in-person to online? Do we reach the point where in fact the school ceases to have a physical existence at all, and only a virtual one? Could the same mission be achieved? That would certainly be interesting. If everyone is represented by an avatar as opposed to a real face, do you achieve the same teaching result? Do the avatars proxy for you adequately?