"alternative energy sources"

chatter about "alternative energy sources" has been around for a long time...I recall hearing this probably for the first time right after the original 1973 "oil crisis"...

what are these sources of energy? remember your physics: energy can neither be created nor destroyed, just converted from one form into another. That is not necessarily easy to do (atomic bomb), but it can be done.

(numbers used here: from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(power) -- go look at this, there are some interesting numbers towards the bottom)

the sources you hear about:

1) Wind power. If you put a fan blade in the path of moving air, it will rotate. if you have the mechanical linkage from that rotation to a generator, you can draw electrical power from it. This is a conversion--you are taking kinetic energy from the air movement, and converting it into electrical energy. So what happens to the air as a result? It slows down. Or it cools down. Or both.

How much energy can you extract without causing some other problem? If you could remove 100% of the kinetic energy, the air would come to a stop. Well, what causes it to move in the first place? Energy from the sun, the daily heating and cooling cycle, rotational differences (you know, Coriolis). You'd also end up removing thermal energy, making the air colder; perhaps that would help with global warming :)

2) Ocean currents. Pretty much the same as wind--if you could put a fan of some sort in the water perpendicular to the Gulf Stream, the (albeit slow) ocean current would cause a rotation that could turn generators for electricity. What would happen to the water? The current would slow down, and it would get colder.

The bad thing here is that ocean life is super-sensitive to temperature changes. A drop of one or two degrees would be a disaster for marine life.

Fortunately, the engineering cost of doing this would be insane, so it's pretty unlikely.

3) Geothermal. Taking advantage of the thermal gradients underground. If the earth's core is pretty hot, as we've been taught, then this should work fairly well. I'd argue that the engineering cost is again way too high for large-scale use.

4) Solar. The biggest, and essentially inexhaustible, energy source within a light-year or two is the Sun. You can look this up (got my number from Wikipedia, so it's as trustworthy as that is): solar energy striking the earth is about 1300 watts/square-meter. I don't know if that's at the equator, the poles, or average over the entire surface, but let's use it anyway. ("1.366 kW - astro: power received from the sun at the earth's orbit by one square metre" -- sounds like equator to me)

Solar power conversion efficiency is about 10-15% right now (we've been doing this for >30 years, but that's all the better we are). So figuring other losses, let's say we can reliably get 100 watts/sq-yard. There are 3 million square yards per square mile. That means we can get 300 megawatts of electrical power for each square mile of solar cells we build. During daylight, mind you, which IS a problem. Let's suppose we gave approx 100 square miles of otherwise unused land per state to this (so Rhode Island probably can't do that, but Nevada could pick up the slack). That's 300 MW * 100 * 50, or 1.5 Terawatts. That's in the ballpark of total world electrical consumption (Wikipedia: 1.7 TW - geo: average electrical power consumption of the world in 2001 (presumably that's daily average)).

The current retail cost of solar panels is about $5/watt, which is kinda high. In large-scale construction quantities, let's say that drops to $2 installed. That means that our proposed qty above is $3 Trillion. We would not, of course, pay that all at once, and other costs would go down as that got phased in (oil consumption would drop quite a bit, because we could stop using it for power generation during the day (still need night-time--what to do?)).

The night-time issue is interesting...Options are to continue to burn fossil fuels (oil, coal) for this. Another alternative is have a lot of batteries underneath the solar panels; I doubt this is adequate for the entire night...A friend has suggested that excess power should be used to spin up large inertial masses that would thus be storing a lot of energy in their rotation (giant flywheels), and the night-time extraction would be far less than the daytime need, so they could hold enough for overnight every day, all year. This strikes me as having some real engineering problems: how big can these things be? how quickly do they wear out? what are they made of? can you spin them fast enough (material strength)?

Ultimately of course this leads (as it inevitably must) to the Dyson sphere, but we don't need to try to do that any time soon :)

But...imagine that we had spent $500 Billion on energy development instead of a war in Iraq, which has not made the cost of energy cheaper (the opposite, if anything). That's a relatively small fraction (15%) of the total needed, but it's a certainty that the process of having done so would change the world. I think it's engineering-feasible. and we MUST get off the oil.

final on Spellforce 2

I played this through to the end, and there were nearly no crashes. I say "nearly", because there WERE a couple of crashes, but that seemed more a problem about how much other stuff I had running at the same time (which was generally way too much).

As you aren't the Rune Warrior, you don't auto-respawn if "killed", and if YOU get killed, your whole team likely will too; not always, but likely.

There's an expansion pack, but I won't be getting that. The only way it comes in the US is as part of the get-all-five-games-in-one-box-on-one-disc, for $30. Maybe not...unless I can find it used <$10 or something.

Spellforce 2

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.


---

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.

A programming tidbit

from the PDF Ref doc for Hibernate:

----

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.

another amusing non-affiliate

Hyde Yoga, a clothing operation in NYC.

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.

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.

more on Spellforce...

I finally gave up on this...it crashed one too many times...

I played through the original game, the first expansion, and into the 2nd expansion. Still too many crashes, and they pretty much always occur when you take a portal to a new/other island. You really have to do a save just prior to exiting the portal.

I had just finished playing an island that was particularly hard, in fact so hard I had to use the god mode cheat to complete it.

Why? because of two things: you have two companions on this one, but they can't be controlled. They follow you everywhere, run into camps of opponents as soon as they see them, which then draws attention to you sneaking around.

This map has four groups of opponents. Two of them you can eliminate by yourself, although your companions make that a lot harder. You want to do this because otherwise if you activate the Orc monument, the patrols start, and you waste resources on them.

SPELLFORCE LESSON: ALWAYS ELIMINATE ALL OPPOSING FORCES BY YOURSELF TO THE MAX EXTENT POSSIBLE.

Opponents are created via these "magic fountains", which are activated when you touch a monument. Usually. Sometimes they are activated anyway...usually quiescent, once you touch a monument, the patrols begin, with a single sentry at first, but then more, and stronger sentries. Avoid that problem by eliminating them support buildings yourself. You have fairly long-distance version in the ground-level almost-1st-person view, and they are easy to spot a long ways off. Generally you can sneak up and destroy the buildings that support the fountains, and then they go away.

On this map, you have to use orcs, and they aren't very strong (no idea what level, but probably not more than 15), whereas your opponents range from 22 to 36. I too am 36, so *I* don't have a problem with the opponents, as long as I don't get surrounded by too many, but the 3rd and 4th groups of opponents also have magic fountains, albeit no random patrols.Group #3, the demons, are level 34-36, so even an army of 80 orcs doesn't really have a chance against them--the orcs are primarily a distraction, while you go fetch something the demons were protecting. Same with group #4, the mummies; they are level 25, which means I could take on a bunch, they'd not have all that much health, but they are surprisingly well armored--at best I was only doing 40 pts of damage. An npc you are supposed to help warns you that you really want to burn them (ok, mummies=bandages=flammable, makes sense), but your orc fire mages are still pretty weak, and run out of mana quickly, and you encounter these mummies primarily in waves of ten, in narrow chasms.

All of which was annoying me further and further, and then I forgot to save before taking the exit portal, and it crashed, I lost hours of work on it, and said--enough is enough!

So it is possible I'll come back to this at some point, I doubt it. I have the Spellforce 2 demo, now I'm less likely to try it out...Unreal Tournament calls me instead--it runs fine, doesn't crash...

Home Network Trauma

I have cable-modem-based internet connection. Over the last six months (or something like that) it has been having odd slowdowns, where it appears I'm just losing the signal or something.

So I happened to pass the tech guys at the mall booth at lunch 2 weeks ago, and asked about it. They said my cable modem is dying, I was really lucky to have gotten the number of years from it that I did (probably about 8), they said 3 was more realistic.

Well, I thought, I was one of the really early signups for access, so maybe the problem now is that it is being overwhelmed by the traffic volume on the cable (as I doubt they have class-C-subnetted all the neighborhoods in the county). And the standards have taken a step forward as well. So I went and got a new model, a Moto Surfboard.

Called the cable co to tell them the new MAC address, figured that would do it...but no, twas a disaster--nothing inside my house would work after that. I spend days trying to figure this out...went back to the old modem, trying to recover to where I was, to isolate the problem. It began to look like the router, but why would that suddenly go bad because I changed its input? A guy at work suggested I had gotten a lot of time out of the router, too...

These things run in a benign environment, electronics generally will last a long time like that. As a former hard reliability guy (early 80s), I know this. MTBF on component parts is generally in the million hours range at room temp. That's over 100 years. Failures are generally catastrophic, rather than slow degradation.

All of a sudden, however, it looks like the router has a break in the middle. The cable co can detect it from their side, and my machines can get DHCP addresses n stuff on my side, but nothing crosses the divide. I know the modem is still ok because I can separately test that from my laptop, and get outside just fine.

So I got a new router, too (Netgear, since that's the only one I saw at Best Buy that actually said "firewall" on the box). And then it turned out a cable was bad--not one of the crappy ones I made with a crimper, but one I bought (or it came with something). This time the router has 8 ports on it, which let me get rid of the little 10T punk switch I had in there limiting speeds internally. But I am still on the old modem, again, and still have the slowdowns. Maybe I can ebay the old router.

It took me four DAYS to get this figured out this far, and be back to "normal", i.e., working again.

Gotta get the Moto modem back in the picture, but I'm vaguely worried about that new arrangement. I do know it works solo, tested that too with just a laptop. But still...all I wanted was for the weird slowdowns/dropouts to stop, but this has so far cost me $210. I'm going to be perturbed if I spent that much only to achieve nothing more than eliminating the one little four-port switch.

The basic arrangement inside here isn't trivial. Wish I could inline a picture here...anyway, calbe modem connects to router/firewall. Router connects to wireless switch, another 8-port switch, a printer. The wired switch connects to most of the machines, the wireless to my laptop and my Apple TV unit. The old firewall only had one inside socket, so that went to the 4-port which then went to the other things. Now I have plenty of empty ports inside, and I can/will re-arrange a few items, probably just moving the printers.


(related: my laser printer had kind gone off-network for some reason. It had 3 sockets on the back, ethernet, paralle, USB, so I was able to set it up so that my wife's compy could use the USB, and my son's pc could use parallel, and my machines could use those two as print servers. awkward, but it worked. So I was able to get a new network card for the printer, off ebay, $25, in the hope that that was all I needed to replace. Installed that, and then discovered that I had to reset its IP Address back to the right subnet, the default was something 10.10.10.10 So I fixed that and it was back on the net...later I wondered if that was the problem with the original card--suppose it had just lost it's IP address (a static one I assigned it in my internal subnet, since it doesn't have to get outside, it doesn't need DHCP or DNS) ? It did not even occur to me that that could have happened...but I haven't put the old one back in to find out.

These things are apparently more sensitive than I thought...

For comparison: sitting on the bookcase across the room is a digital clock. Works fine, keeps good time unless there's a power outage or serious flicker. It has taken a few hits, so the display is slightly cockeyed, but not much. Never wrong about the time, it counts 60 Hz line frequency.

I built that clock in 1974. I've had it longer than nearly everything I own. A very small number of books and records I've had longer (I do have a fair number of books that are older than that, but I haven't had them that long).

So I know that electronics can last for a lot of years, even under power (the clock has been plugged in almost non-stop since I built it).


Unrelated, but about compy upgrades...I did swap out the old drives for the 500 GB units in my G5. That is nice to have a huge amount of space again.

AJAX Tools

Had occasion recently to learn an AJAX tool called "Thinwire"

It's pretty interesting. There are about six tools I know of in this category. Thinwire, ZKOSS, JSeamless, Echo2, Karora, TIBCO GI, and GWT.

They all purport to separate you from the need to write a bunch of javascript and do the comm.

Which is good. I have experience with Thinwire, it appears to be the most java-like (well, it IS java, and ONLY java). Echo2 appears to be prettier, and is also all Java. Karora is a clone of Echo2. The others stray from the pure java idea, with mixed results. Thinwire ONLY does java, which means you can't integrate javascript tools like Simile, FCKEdit, or GMAPs. ZKOSS can integrate those things, but it isn't pure java, which means you are doing a weird hybrid (java, XUL/XML, javascript, html, css).

I would like to be able to take the time to make an example that runs in all of them, to do a solid comparison. but no time at the moment...each of the above websites has demos (although the JSeamless one is all Flash (!?) which is quite curious---I mean, if you tool is really good, your entire website should be built from it, incl the demos), a sandbox tool, and documentation.

played yet another computer game or two...

Got several new games either for or near Christmas...

Guild Wars (right after TG)
Sam and Max, Season One
Jade Empire
Spellforce (actually, I got this a while ago, finally installed it)


Guild Wars is an online-only MMO game. I've written about it elsewhere ...haven't played for a few weeks while I did the others...


Sam and Max simply wouldn't install--the very first time I could see the disk, but the installer would not run. After that, couldn't even see the disk. No idea what the problem is, I read online a few comments about the disks having trouble with certain drives, so I swapped out the DVD-RW in my machine for a CD-RW in the old machine, and that worked just fine...so there's something about that disk that didn't like the DVD drive it was in...kinda strange.

Anyway, a pretty funny game. Not a style I normally play, this is, while interactive, one of those simplistic ones where you have to click on all the stuff you can in each venue, and various little details you learn and items you pick up get used later. So it does involve some puzzle-like thinking, as opposed to:


Spellforce, which is pretty much your standard RTS, with a multiplayer mode. There are multiple races you can and will play/use during the game. Each has strengths and weaknesses.

Humans: pretty good overall, no specials. You can build defensive towers, and breeding farms for more food. At the moment, I think I don't have those structures available...
Elves: not great melee fighters, but excellent archers, and you can build defensive towers. Mostly the opponents won't even attack the defense structures, and you can often build a massive qty, effectively doubling or tripling your force strength. Structures require wood, and you can grow your own forest, which I recommend doing almost immediately. In general, there isn't going to be enough wood available to build everything you may want.
Dwarves: No ranged fighters, and no defensive towers. This is really bad. On the other hand, you can grow your own food (pig farms), which means that you can rapidly increase your food supply, which is the necessary resource for increasing your limit on force size upgrades.

My pref is the Elves, because of the towers, and the forest. My least favorite is the dwarves, because no ranged fighters (well, you can get ranged, they throw axes, that's an upgrade on one of the buildings), and the possibility that you won’t have enough iron to keep making fighters, and the "healers" don't seem to do that.

Managing your structures is important, as with most RTSs, which means that you have to micromanage this. I’d like to be able to take a squad of Elf workers, and tell them to make Towers in a particular area, and not stop until I say so. Once an area is cleared of trees, they should plant a forest to replace what’s been used. Then wait a bit, and start harvesting. I’m not really into this micro-managing routine, but that’s probably because the first really great game I played was Alpha Centauri, and while it allowed you to micromanage each city, you could also just provide a general goal, and the “city manager” would make the construction selections. That was good.

Resources do slowly regenerate, so just because you use one down to zero doesn’t mean it’s gone forever. But once it hits zero, you don’t need to leave > one worker on it, because that’s all the faster it will regenerate.

There are also Heroes, and Titans. Your Heroes are limited, but you do occasionally get new/stronger ones. These are not your primary forces, although a few maps allow only heroes. The human Titan is a Gryphon, the Elf Titan is what looks like an Ent.

On one of the maps, there are two different sets of opponents (beasts and skeletons; I LOVE ambulatory skeletons, those are even better than zombies), and they will attack each other if they get too close, which they will because once they start sending their waves of attackers towards you, they have to go through the same path chokepoint, and will tend to do it at the same time.

Your bots, of course, all run on Artificial Stupidity. Just like all the other games that feature AS, they will run towards a fight, and even when you stop them and make them go another direction, they are likely to run right back to the fight. And they’ll tend to bunch up, which is bad if your force is larger than the opponents. What happens: you’ll most notice this with the dwarves: your fighters will attack, and attempt to surround individual opponents—and you can only get six of them around one opponent. Others will attack a different opponent. But if there are two opponents adjacent to each other, you probably only get 8 of your fighters in there, reducing the odds from 6:1 to 4:1. If there’s room to spread out, your Elf archers can attack at 10:1 or greater, resulting in fast kills.

As with too many other games, the in-game economy is not very interesting. GET A CLUE, FOLKS! Either do this better, or drop it entirely.

The quest book is reasonably good, but the info doesn't tell you where to go back to to find NPC X who will give the next step.

I have also had clipping errors where the camera position was inside a wall my player was standing too close to.

Another nifty aspect here not generally done elsewhere: you can go from overhead view down to close-in 3rd-person, which can be interesting. In overhead view, map territory is dark until explored. In 3rd-person, intervisibility is the limiting factor for the terrain.

Other things to note: often you don't want to play the game the way they think you should. I.e., just because there's a monument doesn't mean to want to activate it and starting making things. Often it's better to fully explore by yourself, kill everything you can, because once you activate monuments to make workers and fighters, the opponents starting spawning things too. So if you can avoid that, it's better to do so. This also avoids the micro-managing of construction. (Hero monuments don't count in this, since they only make Heroes, and not workers/buildings. Always make the Heroes.) Also: if you can get to a point where you have enough defensive towers to protect you completely, while the opponents keep on coming, just let them do so for a few hours, overnight/weekend...all those kills are XP for you, and with the towers, don't need to be attended to all the time, which means you can level-up while doing nothing. I don't know if you get points while opponents attack each other. Some opponents' defensive towers can take off 250 HP at a time; you are dead if you get in range, and so will be your team members, one shot, maybe two.

I've played through the original game, and nearly all the first expansion; definitely got my money's worth. It's buggy, I get crashes all too often, generally with a C++ message about failing to a texture. It's getting to be a grind...I have the demo for Spellforce 2, but I have not installed it.


Jade Empire won’t run. The installer goes fine, but the first thing the game wants to do at startup is run a “Config” step, and this goes into infi-loop right away. I’m going to be able to get the disk replaced for free, but my suspicion is that that won’t fix anything, I think this is either a prob about being Windows x64, or my video driver. I’m pretty sure that I saw this before recently…forget where, tho.

BAD music

back in 1993, Dave Barry published a story in which he declared "Howdy Hooty Sapperticker" by "Barbara and the Boys" to be the worst song ever.

Well, here it is:

Hooty Sapperticker

it's definitely bad.

and apparently here's the B-side of the 45 of that. it's an instrumental, so not as interesting.

Cobra

Who'd have thought?

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?

Bioshock

d/l'd the demo...installer ran ok, it didn't complain about my machine...but I got zip for video--a large dark brown rectangle. I could hear something happening, but no visuals at all.

no indication of what was wrong. UT04 still runs just fine. I find myself wondering if I had hardware trouble after being on vac in late august. went away for a week, powered everything down...when I came back, the PC did NOT want to boot; boot disk didn't get recognized by the mobo, so it dropped that disk from the boot order (why would you do that? let ME control that), and then when it WAS recognized, would not boot. took me a while, incl reboots and looking at the BIOS settings, before I figured out that was what had happened. I had feared it was the new 1GB RAM stick (which had been a problem in the beginning, where the machine did not want to boot with anything other than a 256 in one slot and one of my 512s in the other). So I was fiddling with RAM, and trying to figure out the disks...gad. Eventually: back to normal, but no idea why there was a prob.

Twas after this I did the bioshock d/l, and saw that weirdness. so then I went to check out some other games. Dungeon Siege 1 played fine, but 2 did not (really weird stuff with colors, and showing a gazillion triangles wiggling around (in game motion, and sparklies).

curses! now I'm a little bit worried about the machine. (any worse, and I have to change it's name to the beaver).

software dev...

I'm a programmer (hacker in the old-style definition)...over 30 years...have done a variety of things.

work by others that I like:

JCarousel -- this is a clone of Apple TV GUI. very pretty. Although it is perhaps the 3D icons that make it look so good. I'm interested in 3D GUI these days.

affiliations...

We are NOT affiliated with Hyde School, altho we do find the name connection intriguing. Unlike us, they don't produce Advanced Degrees.

We are likewise NOT related to hYdErOcK, although we like her looks...and some of the music, especially this one.

We are also NOT related to Hyde Yoga, although my wife's name is now Hyde, and she IS a yoga instructor.

favorite things...

there's only one thing I like more than reading...but I'm probably not writing about that here...primarily I read science fiction. Being an engineer and software jockey, that shouldn't be too surprising.

finally read all the titles by Charles Stross that I have (Timelike Dip, Accelerando, Glasshouse, OHMOS)...he's done more, but mostly short stories in the mags, and things under contract but not yet in print. See his FAQ for more info. a little bit of his writing is actually on his website.

Accelerando is absolutely amazing...wish I'd written it...the wild-n-crazy-idea density in this novel is almost off the scale, like nothing you've ever read. (it originated as a series of short stories) The funky ideas roll off (like the classic, oft-mentioned Heinlein "the door dilated", which was about the only time Heinlein tossed off something like that) at a pace you've never seen before. read the electronic version here.

All the stories I read have some inter-related flavor (incl use of certain phrases), they are all about "the singularity", a point in time (probably in the future, but perhaps the recent past, too) beyond which it is no longer possible to imagine what the future is going to be like, because the rate of change due to technological advances is so high that you are future-shocked continuously. Bring it on, I say--can't happen to soon.

Stross handles that all like it's a walk in the park. We are certainly approaching that time, I'd argue that it's this century, because we are basically progressing in terms of computing and biotech at an unbelievable speed, and the convergence of those two things is going to happen soon.

Timelike Diplomacy is only a little based on the singularity. Accelerando is ALL about it, OHMOS is differently based on it (mixing tech with the occult -- not hard to imagine, "sufficiently advanced tech = magic")

Stross has been a computer jockey, too...in the stories I read, he mentions two programming languages, one I consider scruffy in the extreme, the other my all-time favorite (and which I used to be *very* good with).

I haven't been this impressed with a new (at least to me) write since I discovered Peter Hamilton a few years ago.

new computer games

a few weeks ago I came across the place where I had installed the Supreme Commander demo but never run it...so I fired it up.

well, no I didn't. after thinking for a short while, it decided my computer isn't fast enough. huh? granted, it's not top of the line, but I have more than a few games that run quite well on it...I think it was unhappy about the clock rate.

I have an AMD 3800+ X64 dual core. I run XP x64. I have an ATI X1600 (all those X's, gotta love it). So why is that insufficient?

Today, I was at Best Buy (getting a 1GB mem upgrade stick, so now I have 1.5 GB). Also had a look at the Bioshock boxes. says it wants a 2.4 GHz Pentium...how does my cpu compare to that? what about other new games? am I going to be out of the market soon? this machine runs UT04 just fine, Oblivion and HL2 likewise.

Computer upgrades

I generally build and upgrade my computers myself--that way I control what I have, and get improvements when I want them as opposed to when someone else thinks I should have them. My requirements are different from other folks...

So on my Macintosh G5 tower, I've got an extra internal disk, 4GB RAM. It's about time to replace disks in there, because 500 GB drives are now under $100. The mind boggles...I mean, that's an ENORMOUS amount of space. The machine came with a single 160 GB, and I added another 160. They're pretty much full at this point.

The only thing you can do that actually takes that kind of space is digital video. Even with all my digitized CDs and the free music downloads (see blog a few months ago on that), the MP3s only occupy about 100 GB...I started doing digitial video 2 yrs ago, pretty much only to do the DVR bit and slice-n-dice commercials out of TV, or burn a classic old movie to DVD. I'm not making YouTube stuff :)

Digital video takes about 2GB per hour to record, so if you are going to keep much of it, you are going to really need some serious space. What I have does not cut it. Swapping the 160s for 500s will solve that.

My Powerbook laptop only has 80GB to start with, and while that's kinda full (about 15 GB open), that's not what it's for, so I ain't worried about that.

My PC, which I built from components, has about 600GB, but I'm not doing DVR there OR much in the way of music...that's my games and primary programming machine, so 600GB is serious overkill.

Terabyte drives are available already, and soon that will be the default size for desktop machines. Almost absurd, really.

That kind of storage capacity exceeds what you can actually use in your lifetime, if you aren't doing DVR. Think of it this way: the typical document you generate is maybe a megabyte or so. If that takes you a week, you can make 50 a year. During your life you can make a few thousand. Suppose you save an interesting amount of music, 100GB or so. and maybe another 100GB of photos (you can take 1 MB pictures a lot faster than you can create text documents). In fact, it brings you to the point where deleting files is not something you need or want to do.

DOS, Windows and unix (OSX, Linux) -derived operating systems all began back when storage space was infinitesimal in comparison, so the conception was that you never kept extra/different copies of things. And storage was expensive. Nowadays, what different would it make? None, and it might even be to your benefit NOT to be deleting things.

I spent a number of years with a couple of computers whose file-system worked with version numbers as part of file-names, so every time you saved, you got a new version number of a file. After a while you'd have quite a few...which could get to be a problem (in the 70s, I worked on one where the OS (some horror from HP) had multiple versions, but it didn't warn you about running out of disk space until you did so, and as the machine didn't do multi-tasking, you had to quit the editor, losing changes, then go to the file-manager, delete things, and back to the editor to start again...THAT was really annoying, but I wasn't the person who got burned worst by it). But these days, it really wouldn't matter much, and if ALL your software did autosaves, you pretty much would never lose anything.

And indexing of your disk and its contents ought to be a built-in function in the OS. If that worked, you'd have an easier time of finding old docs without having to be as careful about organizing. I'm better at organizing than a lot of folks, and I can't always find things (what did I call that doc? where?) Mac OSX 10.4's "Spotlight" and the Google desktop are good starts at this. Windows is bad by itself, only indexing filenames, although that's better than nothing. (ok, apparently now that's not true, it does some indexing on the contents, but it doesn't do a very good job at all on the filenames--should create a database it can match against rather than re-reading every single directory)

I'd like to put a more advanced video card in the G5, but as I don't play games there too much, what I have (ATI 9600) is adequate. Wouldn't cut it for Doom 3, etc, but that's not what I do on that machine.

On my PC, however, I have an ATI X1600 video, an AMD dual-core cpu, 600GB disk, DVD burner...the one flaw is that I don't have enough RAM. Would like to upgrade, but not sure what to do. Apparently the motherboard wants dual-channel RAM, which I don't have...I have one 256 MB stick, and one 512 MB stick of single-channel. The socket the 256 stick is in won't take a 512, the machine won't even boot with a 512 single-channel in there. So do I need to replace with dual-channels? Do I replace the 512 with a 1GB? What? These are PC3200 (DDR 400) sticks, which are not as common as they used to be, and not as cheap as newer/faster, and I can't upgrade them for speed reasons (I think I can't upgrade the CPU any further for speed either).

[Later: I got a 1GB upgrade for the PC that finally actually worked--back in the beginning when I built the thing it would not take a 512 stick in either socket, now it does, no idea why. That was September. In Nov, I got another one, also works right, and now I am showing 2 GB of dual-channel RAM. didn't get special sticks, just generic, but the boot-time msg says dual-channel. hooray! Will I see a speed diff?]

I'm running Windows 64 on the PC, which has a few other problems--cannot put a WiFi in it, there seem to not be drivers for that for any WiFi I might try...complicated by the fact that I build this in a micro-case, so I have zero expansion inside beyond what I've done...so the WiFi test used an USB WiFi gizmo...which turned out to work fine on the old PC my son uses, other than not being all that fast (I seemed not to be able to force it to be "11g" speed, no idea why).

Well, it's an endless pursuit. Son's PC was my previous one, I built the latest 18 months ago, and will probably build a new one again in another couple of years. I expect the reason for that one will be I need a dual-cpu, dual-core, and a big speed increase for some reason. I don't expect to replace either the laptop or the G5 any time soon...both of them run software I've had quite a while, and the cost of upgrading to the Intel cpu versions of everything would exceed what I can afford.

good humor in the newspaper

I read the Washington Post here...a very good paper, and occasionally you get things that are really funny in an otherwise serious story.

The recent (late July 2007) flap about whether or not the Post should have published a story about whether or not Hillary Clinton should have worn a particular shirt/top with a particular jacket and thus exposed a little cleavage produced some really amusing results.

One of which was an editorial a few days later in which Ruth Marcus referred to herself as "a person of cleavage"!

Hilarious!

having finally played Doom 3...

it is, of course, beautiful...but it's also unrelentingly dark, the kind of dark where you KNOW things are going to jump out and scare you. From behind. Repeatedly.

Which gets tiresome after a while. I was about 3/4 of the way through when I got tired of it, and entered these two lines into the console:

bind f10 god

bind f11 give all

and then things were less annoying. Sarge, for example.

I did like the part where the fact that weapons, ammo, etc are just lying around everywhere--at least that makes sense in the game story. It would also probably help quite a bit if you had a real 5.1 sound system, with speakers placed in front and behind you, so you'd know when a creature spawned behind you (which happens pretty often), and which one it was--they seemed to have unique audio which you could recognize them with (for example, the guy with the shoulder-mounted rockets always seemed to be saying "big banana").

[update on July 30: forgot this earlier: here's the URL to a really nifty screen-snap of what happens when you shotgun one of the zombies up close and personal.

note right above the red circle in the middle there's a round thing with some lines both horiz and vert: that's a zombie brain popping out of the skull after you shoot it in the head with the shotgun at close range. That was classic! Hilarious!]

Questions: with all this mil gear around, how come I don't have night-vision goggles? and how come I can't hold the flashlight and the pistol at the same time?

I only paid $20 for it, got my money's worth, although I won't play it a second time...there are other games I like better, even after multiple plays on an invariant linear game. Like UT04, which I found 30+ maps for last month.


Update on July 29. I watched the DOOM movie again last night (saw it first 2-3 months ago, long before playing the game)...There's really not much connection between the two, which is kinda disappointing. I think if the movie had tightly followed the game, it would have been better...as it was, it seemed like a lot of other secret-genetic-lab-experiments-on-humans-gone-awry movies (wasn't Resident Evil much the same?), as opposed to monsters-from-a-portal-to-hell (and there weren't nearly enough of them--I mean, I musta blasted 3-4 *hundred* in the game). And what was that stuff about evacuating civilians? The Marines strike team spends time in a "sewer" ?! on Mars !? Well, most of the lights were broken in the movie, too--and they did NOT have night-vision goggles. Nor did they find ammo-n-weapons lying around everywhere, etc. Don't get me wrong, I didn't dislike the movie, but it pales next to the game.

Played Half-life 2 recently...

It pretty much lives up to its billing in every way. Except the lack of warning about the linearity. Very nearly no deviation off the main line. No Advanced Degree (tm) needed for this game.

The gravity gun is pretty nifty. Unfortunately, you can't use it to grab and throw opponents until late in the game, which bites. What you CAN do that's interesting is use a 50-gal drum as a shield with the grav gun. The opponents are too stupid to realize what you're doing, and since they can't see you, they don't shoot. Mostly--eventually some of them smarten up and shoot the can out of your grip. You can use it to grab those flying attack-bots and fling them into a wall--that's nice. and slicing zombies with saw-blades--that is way cool.

There are more weapons that you find than you actually need. I didn't find the six-shooter particularly helpful. The shotgun was excellent, the machine gun ok, the rocket launcher is required for some things (incl ones you didn't expect). (actually, the six-shooter is good for those barnacle-things on various ceilings)

The biz about shooting helicopters: we lost a lot of choppers and fighter jets in Vietnam from casual machine-gun fire (give all the villagers machine guns and plenty of ammo, tell them when they hear a chopper or jet to run outside with the gun and just shoot up in the air--you'll end up shredding the flyers eventually, at very low cost). I should be able to bring down those helicopters gunships with any automatic weapon in addition to the rocket launcher. (Did you notice how much those flying things look like bugs?)

There's one spot late in the game where you have four snipers. The first two of them you can really just run past, so you should do so. The reason for this is that you may have a load of rockets (well, 3), and since you can use them to take out the snipers, you might be tempted. However: those first two aren't actually that dangerous. It's the second two snipers that are a problem, and you almost certainly have to have the rockets for them. Online walk-throughs say you can throw hand-grenades at the second two snipers--I absolutely could NOT do that, I got killed quick every time. You CAN hit them with the rockets--the trick is to realize that you can't really show yourself but just barely to where you can see the windows they're inside, and then remember how the rocket launcher works, because there isn't extra ammo around. If you stand up to where those two snipers can see you, you'll be dead quick. But if you crouch to where you can just barely see the top of the window, they can't see you yet, and you can rocket them both.

This game didn't really take me all that long to play, maybe two weeks of serious play time, during which my wife felt neglected :( Definitely worth the $20 I spent; at the moment, I'm not expecting to do any of the expansions. The gravity gun, however...need to see that elsewhere.

August: I went back and played again, after recovering my Steam login. Then I fired up the cheats opportunity, and the played the entire game (after about 3 levels), with the super gravity gun. game was MUCH more fun with that, and realizing that you can grab thrown hand-grenades mid-air and throw them back, in addition to being able to grab virtually any opponent...with one exception. I was not able to grab the ant-lion queens, reason not known, but since if you look at other parameters you can modify in the console, it's all heavy on the physics, they are probably weight-related.

Free online music

Interested in free music? It shouldn't take an Advanced Degree (tm) to figure out how to get good stuff without breaking the law. I want stuff to put on my iPod, to listen on the subway.

It really bugs me that there's so much reported tendency for music or movie piracy. Napster, etc. Of course this occurs because the market is being violated.

For comparison: you want the new CD by [whomever], it's $15, because people are used to paying that kind of price, from 20 years ago when the actual production cost was higher. Now...that production cost is near zero. 20 years ago LPs didn't cost nearly that much, even though the same monopolies existed. But it's still high, because there's no competition.

Example: if you want to buy a CD of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, you can get that for less than $5. Why the diff? Because the 5th is long out of copyright and into the public domain. Anyone can perform and record it. Many do, so there's actual competition, which keeps the cost low. Market forces at work.

So where the cost is high, it's because market violations (sanctioned monopoly) exist.

Don't want to pay that much? Find something else, don't pirate that one. Plenty of alternatives. Vote with your wallet.

Well, where should you look? MP3.com used to be a good place, until someone thought there was money to be made there, bought it, shut it down, and later re-opened with a lot of old stuff gone and prices that I thought weren't competitive.

My favorites are:

http://www.Besonic.com/, a German website, reborn a year or two ago, a year and some after a disastrous disk crash that wiped out eveything and their backups. Besonic has somewhat more traditional grouping/organization. I discovered this website by accident a few years ago, enough before the disaster that I was able to grab an interesting amount of stuff. Most of which was really weak on the ID3 tags, so I have a bunch of tunes with no info...and following their disk crash, no way for me to find out. You have to register to do downloads, but you don't get a big load of spam as a result, just the occasional email mentioning new things.

http://www.jamendo.com/, a Polish website (or maybe it's French), not nearly as much content, but some very nice stuff. Jamendo uses tag clouds as the grouping mechanism, it's weird getting used to. Downloads are via BitTorrent, no registration required. I'm listening to this stuff a lot right now, lots of nice work there. There's a lot of French stuff on here, but they aren't any better at rap than anyone else, which is to say, lau-zee.

Then do the right thing and send the artist some money, if you keep the stuff and listen to it. Nothing encourages the struggling artist like getting some cash :)


Both are highly recommended.

Update on Aug 3, 2007.

http://www.soundclick.com/ is also an excellent source. I had forgotten about this one...

Update on Oct 17, 2007.

found out about another one: Wolfgang's Vault, apparently this has many/most/all of Bill Graham's archive of recorded shows at the Fillmores, etc. OMG! You have got to check this out. There are some AMAZING shows on there: Genesis, Allman Bros, Derek & Dominos, Pink Floyd...most are only available for listening, but if you can rip an audio stream...

Political Thoughts

I live just outside Washington DC, so there's a daily load of politics inundating you.

I used to think that "gridlock" in Congress was a bad thing, but after 12 years of Republican control, I now believe that one party should not have control of both halves of Congress AND the Presidency. Gridlock is not so bad.

I generally vote anti-incumbent. Throw the bums out! Term limits are good--no one should have that job for too long, it's clear that most congress[wo]men are out of touch.

You gotta wonder: since the 06 election, where control of Congress flipped parties on both sides, Republicans have begun to abandon Bush's policies on Iraq...would that have happened if control had not flipped? What would have been different on the ground in Baghdad? Anything?

Why is it so difficult for politicians to say things like this: You are going to have to work past age 65--do not count on that being instant retirement age, that was never the original intention. Don't expect Social Security to completely fund your retirement, it can't.

----

Something else: I find myself wondering when Cheney is going to say something about our "precious bodily fluids".

recent reading...

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.

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!

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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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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).

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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!