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I finally finished Spellforce 1, but not before it crashed a couple more times. Infuriating. Won't play that one again, too many crashes.
Got Spellforce 2 yesterday, for $10, at MicroCenter. Could have also gotten the entire game series, SF 1 + two expansions, and SF2 plus 1 expansion, for $30. Maybe not. I had tried the SF 2 demo game a month or two ago, but that didn't install and run properly, don't know why. Took the gamble on the full game having been patched enough to behave...and it worked fine.
Seems to take place let's say 30-50 years later. You meet up with Craig UnShallach's daughter pretty early. You see a Rune monument, but it's inactive. You aren't a Rune character.
So it's similar, but different. The skills tree looks just like the one in a number of other games. Can't say I think that's good.
Overall the game looks good, the detail is better, the 3D is better. I'm not convinced the UI is any better.
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I was at MicroCenter to get a couple of things: in particular, a new, bigger disk for my laptop. Laptop is just old enough (summer/fall 06) to not have a SATA drive, which means the 120 GB I got is really the biggest thing that's going in there. Fortunately I don't need to do too much with it; no digital video, in particular. I was running out of space on the old disk (80GB), which turned out to be because I had a couple of video podcasts collecting up and hogging space (15 GB). Killed those, and I'm good again, but it's time. I'm thinking about a couple of other possibilities, but it's also time for O/S upgrade, to Leopard, soon as taxes are done.
Anyway, having gotten some games cheap there, I looked around, and SF 2 was $10. That's my threshold at which I'm willing to try most anything.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Sunday, March 23, 2008
A programming tidbit
from the PDF Ref doc for Hibernate:
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4.1. A simple POJO example
Most Java applications require a persistent class representing felines.
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I had no idea. I have clearly been remiss in my past work. Conveniently they provide just such a class def on that same page, so I'll use it in the future.
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4.1. A simple POJO example
Most Java applications require a persistent class representing felines.
----
I had no idea. I have clearly been remiss in my past work. Conveniently they provide just such a class def on that same page, so I'll use it in the future.
Saturday, March 01, 2008
another amusing non-affiliate
Hyde Yoga, a clothing operation in NYC.
Of course our name is Hyde, and my wife is a yoga instructor.
Of course our name is Hyde, and my wife is a yoga instructor.
Crysis
just for grins, I tried to install the Crysis demo today, but it aborted near the end, saying an archive file was corrupted, and that I should download it again and retry.
The installer is 780 Megabytes...I don't think I'll download that a second time...sayonara.
The installer is 780 Megabytes...I don't think I'll download that a second time...sayonara.
Final on Spellforce
I stopped playing this...was partway into the first expansion pack (Breath of Winter), and it seg-faulted on me one too many times, cost me 5-6 hours of play time that I hadn't done a save from, and I decided it was going to be too painful to go back. Granted, that does give you the opportunity to play some part a little differently...which you might not otherwise do.
The problem is this: there is some C++ fault about loading a texture when switching maps. Doesn't show up all the time, but it's fatal. If you saved just before doing the jump (either via a portal or a bindstone), you're fine. You restart, reload, try again, maybe jump from another location (one particular jump just would not work for me, I had to go to a different bindstone). But if you forgot to save, you'd have to do it all over again, which I finally decided was not worth my time. I got a similar kind of fault sometimes when I would go to DO a save, which was really aggravating.
The real problem, I think, is that (besides the crashes, which are just bad) the armies you have to create are weak relative to the opponents...I was trying to take on groups of 10 level-25 mummies with an army of level 15 orcs, in a space limited area. I am level 35, so the mummies are not a big problem for me, I can take on 3/4/5 of them at a time, no real problem. Eventually I had to go to god mode to wipe them out, which I did, and then when I was jumping back to wherever, it crashed. In addition, same map, there was a spawning point of level 34 demons, where you have to drop a 'seed' on a dead tree stump. There are six of the demons, and your entire army of 80 will be wiped out while they distract the demons so you can do the seed and run away. So your army doesn't really keep up with the advances of the opponents, and outnumbering them 5 or 10 to 1 may not help enough.
[Later: this last piece turned out to be my fault: your team is the same level as the worker rune, which was 15 at the time; I had the level 21 rune in inventory, but not in use. After I discovered that, I punted the existing team, used the new rune, and then the demons were fairly easy to beat. This general problem doesn't go away, however--your team always lags behind the opponents by some significant amount, which can require you to be very careful about managing your team.]
Still...no end of crashes, usually costing me some hours of play time. The do-overs were good, they provided an opp to really stomp the enemies (generally by saturating an area with defensive towers).
Still Later: I eventually finished the game, but I wouldn't do it again...the crashing was just bad.
The problem is this: there is some C++ fault about loading a texture when switching maps. Doesn't show up all the time, but it's fatal. If you saved just before doing the jump (either via a portal or a bindstone), you're fine. You restart, reload, try again, maybe jump from another location (one particular jump just would not work for me, I had to go to a different bindstone). But if you forgot to save, you'd have to do it all over again, which I finally decided was not worth my time. I got a similar kind of fault sometimes when I would go to DO a save, which was really aggravating.
The real problem, I think, is that (besides the crashes, which are just bad) the armies you have to create are weak relative to the opponents...I was trying to take on groups of 10 level-25 mummies with an army of level 15 orcs, in a space limited area. I am level 35, so the mummies are not a big problem for me, I can take on 3/4/5 of them at a time, no real problem. Eventually I had to go to god mode to wipe them out, which I did, and then when I was jumping back to wherever, it crashed. In addition, same map, there was a spawning point of level 34 demons, where you have to drop a 'seed' on a dead tree stump. There are six of the demons, and your entire army of 80 will be wiped out while they distract the demons so you can do the seed and run away. So your army doesn't really keep up with the advances of the opponents, and outnumbering them 5 or 10 to 1 may not help enough.
[Later: this last piece turned out to be my fault: your team is the same level as the worker rune, which was 15 at the time; I had the level 21 rune in inventory, but not in use. After I discovered that, I punted the existing team, used the new rune, and then the demons were fairly easy to beat. This general problem doesn't go away, however--your team always lags behind the opponents by some significant amount, which can require you to be very careful about managing your team.]
Still...no end of crashes, usually costing me some hours of play time. The do-overs were good, they provided an opp to really stomp the enemies (generally by saturating an area with defensive towers).
Still Later: I eventually finished the game, but I wouldn't do it again...the crashing was just bad.
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