I finished my holiday road trip last Friday with 6750km and four major Aussie cities covered over 21 day period. The last couple days were fairly long, Friday was 10.5 hours on the road. So I need a vacation to recover! I haven’t really looked at the game news much over that time, and over the last few days either.

But todays news, that Blizzard is retooling their unannounced mystery MMO codenamed Titan; moving 70 of the 100 developers off the project and into other projects while the core team rethink the whole thing really got my attention.

How long has Titan been under development now? I’m not really sure, and can’t be bothered at the moment to look it up, but it must be somewhere in the vicinity of 5 years.

My first thought was to wonder if Blizzard was trying to break the vaporware record set by 3DRealms ill-fated Duke Nukem Forever. Not only did DNF change direction several times, it failed to take into account changing attitudes towards women in games, as well as the way that FPS games have changed over the years.

At this stage Blizzard’s Titan can quite clearly be called vaporware.

After five years of development we haven’t seen one screenshot, one hint about the genre, or anything else substantive about the game. Even by this stage Duke Nukem Forever had teased us with screenshots, art, and a basic idea of what the game was about.

Now with Titan making a big ol’ U-turn it may be another few years before we get any information. There’s no way we’ll see anything at the next Blizzcon, and probably the Blizzcon after that.

Those who are worried that Titan will be a WoW-Killer needn’t be concerned. The WoW servers will be long shut down before this game sees the light of day.

Titan: Vaporware Forever was originally posted on: Stropp's World

The route is in blue, and runs counter-clockwise from Adelaide to Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, all the way up to Rockhampton and then inland back to home.

The main purpose is to destressify, but also to catch up with friends in Sydney and Brisbane.

As I said, it’s been over three years since I had a real break. There have been a few times when business has slowed down, but that tended to be a worry not a holiday. I leave on Saturday morning and get back three weeks later. If everything goes to plan that is.

Taking Another Trip was originally posted on: Stropp's World

I am now trialing The Old Reader. This is a cloud/web based reader which is what I want, and it is based on the original Google Reader. It was put together by a couple of guys who didn’t like the changes Google made to Reader a few years ago. They basically rebuilt the original reader. While I don’t actually remember how Reader originally worked and felt, this is close enough to what I am used to with Google Reader as it is today.

The only issue I can relate is that it takes a long, long time to import feeds.

I found The Old Reader a couple of weeks ago, just after I made the original search for a feedreader post, downloaded the subscriptions.xml file from Google, and started the import process to The Old Reader.

That’s right. It took two weeks to import 128 feeds. Though it probably didn’t matter how many feeds I was subscribed to, it just took that long to get to my import.

Now the reason for this is the monster exodus from Google at the time of the announcement. Don’t forget this is a small scale site created and operated by a couple of guys with limited resources. There were over 28,000 imports ahead of mine when I started. I’d love to see what their database looks like right now. It must be huge.

But, despite the queue, everything is now working at a good speed. Updates to feeds are being processed quickly, and I’m not having any issues at all. I can read the posts oldest first, and they have a setting to hide the post once it is read. Marvelous.

So I think The Old Reader is my recommendation to replace Google Reader. Still got to spend some time with it, but it is looking good. My recommendation though is to changeover as soon as you can before Google’s shut down date of the 1st of July. Don’t leave it too late because you might have to wait a couple of weeks while your feed list imports. That way you can keep using GReader and transition when your feeds are in.

So, all is right again in the world. All except North Korea, global warming, poverty, simcity, politicians, bird flu… okay dammit the world still sucks. But at least I can read about it on a decent feed reader!

The Old Reader : Is my hunt ended? was originally posted on: Stropp's World

I haven’t done so since, not because of any issues with preordering games, or the games themselves but simply because I haven’t felt the need to do so. Although I have felt a tinge of jealousy from time to time with players getting into the head start periods just before a game officially opens to the masses. Especially when I read blog posts from other bloggers who are all having a fine old time.

I guess the other factor holding me back from the preorder purchase is the old adage never play on launch (or patch) day. That was strongly reinforced with the recent Simcity debacle, but has been a part of playing MMORPGs since the early days. That initial influx of tens of thousands of players hitting the servers for the first time really tests how well a developer has put together their code. While recent years that has got better, memories remain of disastrous launches that finally settled down after some weeks or months.

At one time I figured that since MMO development was a really new field, that developers would eventually develop the tools and knowledge to ensure smooth launches, and for the most part I think they have, even if one of those tools is putting players in massive queues. But game software network development on large scales is still somewhat inexact, and the bigger companies capable of developing and marketing AAA games appear to want the best of both worlds: low initial spending on server hardware, but still grabbing as many players as they can as early as they can.

It all boils down to the fact that you can’t be guaranteed a bug-free gaming session, or even getting past the queue, on launch day.

How about you, do you preorder, or do you prefer to wait?

Do You Preorder? was originally posted on: Stropp's World

Darkfall Unholy Wars Launch – April 16

Thu, 04/04/2013 – 13:09

Darkfall Unholy Wars will launch on April 16th after 5 months in beta. During beta, we addressed many issues through 8 major updates, did a lot of work on game balance and game polish, increased game performance on all levels, added new features like salvaging, changed the way character progression works through Prowess Points,  -effectively eliminating macroing gains and ensuring that characters progress only by playing the game- added a new role, the Primalist and completed the integration with the Steam platform.

 The Darkfall community who participated in the beta provided the development team with invaluable feedback a lot of which led to additions and changes to the game, and will lead to many more in the near future. We believe the game has benefited greatly through the Beta process, and we are excited about what lies ahead. We know we have a lot of work to do and we will never be satisfied as we strive to make Darkfall Unholy Wars the best PvP MMORPG experience. .

 Recognizing the importance of the community’s contribution during beta, we will work to continuously improve the community-developer interaction level by daily updates and on many different levels to ensure that the high level of cooperation between developers and players is meaningful and continues to benefit the evolution of Darkfall Unholy Wars throughout its’ lifecycle.

 We will be posting more information in the next few days, updating the community daily on all developments.

As you might be aware, Darkfall Unholy Wars was originally due to be released much earlier this year, January or February I think, and Aventurine intended to shut down the original game and transition to the new one. Despite the delay, Aventurine shut down Darkfall as originally scheduled, leaving them with no running game. Hopefully, come April 16, Darkfall fans jonesing for their hardcore PvP MMO will be able to get in and play.

Darkfall Unholy Wars Announcement was originally posted on: Stropp's World

I started reading his Culture novels a few years ago. I bought Excession a few years before I really got into the Culture, but at the time found it very difficult to follow. I then bought Matter, enjoyed it thoroughly, and went back to Excession and finally got it. Since then I’ve bought a few more of his novels, lately the newest Culture book, The Hydrogen Sonata. Sadly to be the last Culture novel.

Perhaps one of the saddest, or is it ironic, things is that in these books Banks envisioned a universe of plenty, one where such vile things as cancer no longer existed. And hopefully that will one day be the case here on Earth. Cancer isn’t the bogeyman it was less than twenty years ago and the survival rate is much better now, despite cases like Iain’s that still occur all to frequently.

With the rapidly advancing state of science and medicine, I expect and hope that sometime in the near future Cancer will end up no scarier than a case of the Flu.

I don’t want to toot my own horn, but I’ll also let you know that I made a small donation to the Australian Cancer Research Foundation. I’d like to encourage you to do the same, not necessarily to the Aussie foundation if you live in another country, but take the time to look up a cancer research foundation in your own country. Just do a little due diligence to make sure that the bulk of donations actually do go to research. (The ACRF claims 100% goes to cancer research.)

This stuff does take money, lots of it, and the more cash and the sooner it is available to research, the sooner we’ll see the end of this scourge.

Such Sad News was originally posted on: Stropp's World

• Diablo 3 Jay Wilson made a comment that Blizzard greatly underestimated the usage of the Auction Houses in that game by player.

• James Ohlen, the creative director of SWTOR stated that Bioware also greatly underestimated the speed at which players would consume content.

I don’t want to get into debates about the merits of these games or systems in this post, but I do want to talk about why these comments don’t ring true to me.

First of all these comments are coming from two veterans of the computer game industry, and not just that these are guys that have been in the front lines of game development for many years. We should also consider that they have worked on some of the biggest and most anticipated games to date; they’re not lightweights. They’ve been around the block a few times. They are the cream of the crop.

Game developers, and particularly MMORPG developers, have known since the first MMOs, that players have a tendency to rush to the level cap. MMO players consume content like a zombie consumes brains. How many games release one day, then two or three days later have players announcing they’ve capped.

How many articles and blog posts have we read about players complaining that a game has no high end content because they’ve rushed and run out of content well in advance of what the developers planned for?

And look at auction houses with the millions of words written about them. How we see players aggressively pursuing the market, and engaging in trading practices that would make the NYSE blush or proud depending on who was running it at the time.

Right from the start of MMO gaming, players have looked for ways to make their characters as effective as they possibly can be. Asheron’s Call players may be familiar with such things as 10/100/10/100/100 (I think I got the attributes for a mage correct there.) Players will min/max to make the right character, even if more distributed settings will create a more well rounded but weaker character.

So to hear a pair of veteran game developers, in 2013, say they underestimated what players would do with the long standing and well understood systems they were putting in their games…

Really?

If It Smells Like Spin was originally posted on: Stropp's World

The Turd of the Seven Kingdoms

Season 2 of Game of Thrones has just been released here in Australia (yep, that why we’re named as the biggest pirates of this particular show, because it’s just so darn good and they take so damn long to release it here!) and I’m working my way through the episodes. I’m on the last disc now.

But man, the guy they got to play Joffrey, Jack Gleeson, is really good. He makes me hate Joffrey in the series as much as I hated him when I read the book. And I’ll tell you, that was a lot. Every chapter and scene he was in, I wanted him dead. Just kill him already dammit!

I just hope he doesn’t get type cast in that role. He’ll never be able to play a good guy if the audience can only recognise him as that little turd Joffrey.

But seriously, Hollywood execs, if you want to minimize piracy here in Oz just get the show released here as quickly as possible, the DVD box sets too. I’ll wager that the shows here that get ‘fast-tracked’ from the US are the least pirated.

BTW no spoilers please, I’ve read all the books but the last and I’m a third way through that.

I Hate Joffrey was originally posted on: Stropp's World

After reading a few things, I headed over to Feedly. I’ve heard good things about this, but there is just one problem. It’s not a web service. It’s a downloadable plugin for Firefox or an app. For one thing that’s not acceptible, for the other I’m about ready to dump Firefox completely. Frankly, it’s a piece of crap. It crashes regularly at least two or three times a week. If the updates are turned on, it crashes whenever something is ready to install. In anycase, a downloadable bit of software is not what I want.

So the next port of call was NewsBlur. It looked okay, and the demo worked the way I like. But here’s the catch. I have 128 feeds. NewsBlur only allows 64 on a free account. It’s not expensive for the next level up, about $2 a month, but I’m not looking at paying for this. One of the reasons for this post is to recommend a good free reader for you. And I’m cheap…

I then tried NetVibes. Okay this works very similar to Google Reader. And it’s free for a personal account. There’s a couple of subscription levels that I didn’t go into, but they seemed to be for agency and business use. However the problem with NetVibes was that it wasn’t user friendly. When you start, there are a bunch of sites you are pre-subscribed to. I didn’t want these and spent the next half hour dicking around trying to figure out how to delete them. There was no help on this. The link to the forum takes you to their blog. I did figure it out, loaded up my old feeds, and started reading.

But the worst thing was that I couldn’t figure out how to get my feeds ordered. It seems it is always newer at top. I use older at top as it provides a better history. I always see the older story first so I can get the flow of things. It’s good to see several blogs cover a story in order. This helps to understand it better. The other thing about NetVibes is that read stories stay visible. On Google Reader they disappeared after being read and refreshed. I found after I had been running it for a while it became hard to find new stories without scrolling through dozens of old previously read stories. Not good.

So I went to my last choice. Bloglines. I used Bloglines years ago before Reader. It was pretty good back then. However, after loading up the page and recovering my password I had a rude shock. Bloglines is now NetVibes. It still has the Bloglines branding, but uses a NetVibes signin. Sigh.

So, the search continues for a new feed reader. How about you. Any luck yet?

The Search For A New Feedreader Continues was originally posted on: Stropp's World

Hmmm,

That looks familiar.

Let’s check out the site. Media section right. Yep. Thought so. That user interface shot looks eerily like the user interface of Anarchy Online.

That video grab on Massively’s post. Damn! Not only the GUI dialogs, but the mini-map, graphics, even the icons in the inventory, they all look like AO.

Either these devs are huge fans of Anarchy Online, or…

Or perhaps I’m crazy. What do you reckon?

Does The Repopulation Remind You Of Another Game? was originally posted on: Stropp's World