Saturday, December 28, 2002

Homepage

Finally designed a style for my home page. Still have a few buggy colors and other stuff in the CSS file that need to be tweaked, but it's at least approachable now. Of course, now I have to figure out what I want to put where (unlike here where I just write whatever jumps into my head). Got a bunch of ideas, just have to figure out how I want to organize stuff.

posted by Wuphon's at 8:18 PM

Another MOO3 preview screenshot

Found this one on the InfoGrames Master of Orion 3 forums posted by one of the beta testers:


A beta tester's attempt at becoming the sole superpower in the galaxy.

posted by Wuphon's at 5:33 PM

Annual Upgrades (Cont'd)

*still* working on the annual upgrade plans, trying to figure out which tape drive to get (AIT2 looks like the best of our options), still rebuilding one of my two servers, moving files around, setting up scratch USB 2.0 drives (works well), redesigning the look of the intranet web (90 percent done), etc.

... haven't played a game (MOO2, EQ) since last weekend (eep!) ... I'm starting to get inquiries from the friends in my EQ guild (chuckle).

On a side note, sleep cycle is messed up at the moment (I suspect the next few weeks are going to be "down" mood).

posted by Wuphon's at 5:20 PM

Tuesday, December 24, 2002

Annual Upgrades

Dunno what it is about late-December for me... either I'm truly coming out of my depression, or the thought of a new year makes me think about all of the technical plans that need to be made this year. So far, I've started the ball rolling on getting one of our externally hosted servers upgraded (we should manage to get about 2.5x to 3.0x performance boost for only 25% to 50% additional costs per month). We're also looking to buy new tape drives (leaning towards the AIT2 drives that are 50Gb native 130Gb compressed for $1500 plus $60/tape). And I also wrote up a price estimate to finally upgrade our Development group's server from a build-it-yourself system to a nice dual 2.0Ghz Xeon 1Gb DDR RAM with mirrored 72Gb Ultra320 drives, all in a compact 2U case with dual 500W power supplies. And the pricing on that system is currently only $5500 (drools), but will probably ask for $8000 so we can buy a few other extras.

All that, plus I rebuilt a server in the past two days. It's been a very busy week so far. The first quarter of the year is typically slow for us, so it's a good time of the year to do all of these upgrades even if the cash flow is a little tight. Plus, we just added a 5th person to the group (we've added 1 a year now for the past 3... although the 5th person is about 4 months early) so we're outgrowing existing equipment.

posted by Wuphon's at 8:30 PM (0 comments)

White Christmas

Yep, it's gonna be a white Christmas here in Pennsylvania this year, about half an inch on the ground and more expected through the night and all of tomorrow. (NOAA is saying 2-4 overnight - and not saying anything about Christmas day or night, another weather site says expect 4-8 inches total by Friday morning.)

posted by Wuphon's at 8:21 PM (0 comments)

Drop-kick

Yahoo! News - Jackson Baby-Dangling Exploits Spawn Video Game

BERLIN (Reuters) - Michael Jackson's baby-dangling exploits have spawned a new video game in which the player has to catch babies in a basket as a cartoon version of the popstar hurls them from a rooftop.

...

Actually, if I remember right, back in the early days of MS-DOS (think late 80s) there was a game where babies were being thrown out of a burning building, and you had to move the firefighters carrying a trampoline side to side to bounce the babies into the waiting ambulance. The graphics were cheesy 4 or 16 color (I don't remember if it required a CGA or EGA card) and reminded you of the early days of arcade games (back when 256 colors at 640x480 was very hi-resolution). Heck, the game could be have been called "baby bounce" or something silly like that. I'd have to locate an old copy of the Public Brand Software catalog, or maybe dig through the old CompuServe libraries (if they still exist).

posted by Wuphon's at 8:29 AM (0 comments)

Monday, December 23, 2002

Moon Hoax Index

Can you believe that there are folks out there who believe the Moon landings were a hoax? I think even one of the Dilbert comic strips had fun with this (no I don't have a link at the moment). Anyway for those who are curious about the debate see:

Moon Hoax Index

posted by Wuphon's at 6:38 PM (0 comments)

Master of Orion 3 Screenshots

Just some screenshots that I filched off of The Master of Orion 3 Guardian, these screens were the ones that really drive home just how BIG a game with 256 star systems is going to be (I think MOO2 was limited to 80? stars). Note that these are older screenshots, so I kind of expect some things to have changed by the time it goes gold.


First up is an overall view of the galaxy. Looks like this is the 3-arm version of the spiral galaxy (supposedly you can pick different start cluster types such as 2-arm spiral, globular cluster, etc.). It's a pretty wild looking screen, although you can tell it's a game and not a "real" galaxy. But it does make MOO2's square galaxy look out-dated, and the new galaxy formations will provide some new challenges in terms of area-control. (Later stage game in MOO2 was annoying because enemy fleets had such extended range that there was no "border" to your empire.)


Space-lanes are always an aspect that I've wanted to see added to the MOO-universe. A long time ago I played a game where you were placed in a spherical cluster of stars where the only way to get between stars was by using star-lanes. That was a very nice system (allowed you to pan, tilt, zoom the entire 3D galaxy) but the ship combat was horribly flawed which is why I never played it past a day or two. Still, I'm hoping that this works well in MOO3 even though it looks like the galaxy is "flat" instead of true 3D (true 3D tactics are mind-bending, because there is no absolute frame of reference).


One of the development notes that I saw says that there is a maximum of 256 star systems, each with planets, and planets with moons... so that there's possibly something like 12,000 planets/moons in the game. (MOO2 on the other hand had I think 80 x 5 or 400 maximum planets.) Fortunately, they've added a few layers of macro-control so that I won't have to micro-manage each of those few thousand planets. Instead, you can tag planets as belonging to up to 2 "classifications" and then direct the building queue based on those classifcations.

posted by Wuphon's at 9:06 AM

Meklars Need Space Too

Well, had fun playing MOO2 all weekend (except for the EQ Chardok raid on Saturday). Finally into the end-stages of the game and starting to remember just how brain-dead the AI is in MOO2. The Meklars have been throwing fleet after fleet at my star systems, only to have them crushed by my fleet. (If the AI would just wait and send all of it's ships at once... or build more effective ships) Also, once the stellar converter enters the game, the AI tends to "over-kill" when wiping out planetary defenses and ends up destroying the colony instead of just the defenses. Since the game is about balance of power, a scorched-earth policy is the slow way to lose the war (it's better-faster to take over a colony with troops and subjugate their workers for your empire).

I think what it is, is that the AI in MOO2 is good at the tactical level, but completely blind to strategic goals (the AI lives in the "now"). It has no memory of what has or hasn't worked, or predictive ability (no neural-nets or any sort of learning ability). So it will be interesting to see what happens when MOO3 ships.

posted by Wuphon's at 8:24 AM