Tag: computer

Logic is cold

Gaming

Thanks to Scott for the original link.

One of the problems I find, not just in games but also in life, is that people have an unwillingness to accept logical truth. There is a basic dichotomy to any competative game: if someone wins, someone else has to lose.

Look at something non-MMO, like Baseball… the teams with the most wins last season still lost just over 40% of their games. The Mets and Yankees finished with .599 records. 97 wins and 65 losses. And its considered a pretty good season. Yet somehow, in PvP games, lots of folks find that ratio, dying 4 out of 10 times you enter a fight, to be completely and utterly unacceptable. On the other hand, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays had a .377 season, 61 wins and 101 losses. More than 6 out of 10 times, they lost… if people can’t accept a 40% death rate, a 60+% rate would drive them completely off the “unfair” deep end. If you are winning 6 out of 10 fights… someone out there is only winning 4 out of 10.

There seems to be, among players of computer games, a feeling that somehow them being human playing against a computer (even if its actually another person controlling the enemy on their screen) gives them an edge, that the game will be “more fair”. Of course, the idea of “more fair” is a total waste of time. There is fair and there is not fair. Something cannot be more or less fair, once it stops being fair it is not fair. What they mean by “more fair” is that they will win more often. Against computer AI in most games this is true simply because the game doesn’t learn. It may kick the crap out of you all the time when you first play, but as you play more you will (should) get better, and the computer will not. Eventually, you’ll win all the time because you will have learned all the moves it is programmed to use. Computer games are old dogs, and they don’t learn new tricks.

But when a player takes control of the enemy, now you are playing against… you. When he loses, just like you, he’ll learn. The both of you will learn, and keep challenging each other, and over time what will show is that one of you is better at learning than the other and therefore stays ahead better, winning more often. One of you will be the Yankees, and the other one will be the Devil Rays. And there is nothing wrong with this. Its true. Its logical. And from the point of view of the Devil Rays, totally and completely unfair.

So, what’s the answer? There isn’t one. Like I said, its not fair, and that’s just the way it is. But I will leave you with a thought…

It comes from the movie Rudy, about Daniel Ruettiger. Rudy doesn’t make the real team, but he makes the practice team. In practice, one of the real team guys yells at Rudy for trying too hard. Rudy fires back with this great line (which of course I can’t find right now) about how he has to do his best in order to keep the real team at their best. When you PvP, keep in mind that you may not win all the time, or even most of the time, but by God you can make them work for it.

Happy Birthday PC!

Random Thoughts

Sure, personal computers had existed before, but today marks the 25th Anniversary of the melding of Microsoft and IBM in the form of MS-DOS.

I’ve always liked computers, and seeing as how I was not quite 7 when this monumental merging occurred, and 11 when I got my first PC, its no surprise that MS-DOS is a huge part of my computer history. It seems unfathomable now, but when I took my first job working with computers, Windows 95 was out but wasn’t the standard yet. I was still installing MS-DOS 6.22 on machines, and Windows for Workgroups 3.11. I had a briefcase (and I used to wear a tie to work every day) and inside was always stashed my trusty copy of 6.22, and a few cobbled together boot disks for diagnostics and virus scanning (DOS had no “Safe Mode” to load into to hunt down spyware -of course, there wasn’t a whole lot of spyware- you can to book from a floppy disk and scan from there).

Long before getting a job though, back when I was 11, my parents brought home our first family PC, a Leading Edge IBM PC Clone. It was an 8088 processor, 8MHz, with 512k of RAM. Yeah, that’s a “k” there, half a megabyte. It had a 20 megabyte hard drive in it, and it seemed like we’d never fill it up (20MB these days is about 4 or 5 MP3s). There was a switch on the back where you could set the processor speed down to 4.77MHz, just incase 8 was too fast (and it was for some games). It didn’t have Windows, it booted into DOS and then from the autoexec.bat file it would load up a program called PCMenu, where you could get to the Leading Edge Word Processor, Lotus 1-2-3, and a few other applications. All games were played from disk. We spent a ridiculous $350 to upgrade that machine to 640k of RAM, and another $200 or so on a modem, I think it was 1200 baud, maybe it was an early 2400. And for $50 of my own hard earned cash (you have no idea how hard it was for me to save that and not buy other stuff), I bought an AdLib soundcard from a kid named Ari at school so that our games could play a little more music instead of just beeps through the PC speaker. Not music like you hear out of PCs today, but hardly more than synthesiser, it was awesome. Through the modem I discovered BBSs, back when you’d have to pick up a local trade magazine, or in my case a MicroCenter sale paper, to find the numbers. That’s right, we dialed up the BBS direct on the phone and logged in. There was an Internet, but at that point only schools, the government, and few businesses were really on it. I even ran a BBS for a while, one summer, and only at night when no one else wanted to use the computer.

Eventually we got a new PC, a 386. It was either 16 or 25 MHz, and it had 1024k of RAM, a whole megabyte. This one came with Windows 3.0 installed. And it had a SoundBlaster sound card and a VGA video card. Finally, games played in 256 colors! Well, when they supported them. My parents let me keep the old 8088 in my room, even got me my own phone line, and that pretty set me in with PCs for the rest of my life. Of course, even with a computer in my room, I still used the 386. I mean, the 8088 couldn’t play games like DOOM, Warcraft and Lemmings. Then one day, my friends and I all chipped in and bought network cards (co-axial, naturally) and would get together and play games of DOOM and Warcraft against each other. And when I say “get together” I mean that we would disassemble our PCs, and take them over to one person’s house where we’d put them back together, install network cards, hook up and play into the wee hours of the morning. It would still be a while before ISPs showed up in our area.

After that, when we bought the Pentium 90, the computer history gets a little less interesting (to me anyway). We put Windows for Workgroups on it (made the networking LAN parties easier), and eventually upgraded to Windows 95. It was another PC that saw Windows 98. And since then I’ve gotten a new PC every couple of years, each one at least twice as good as the last. Now my laptop PC, that I’m writing on right now, has double the horse power of my desktop, and my desktop is old enough that it can’t play any new games anymore, except World of Warcraft and other games that go for style over pushing the limits of your machine. My network has gone 100% wireless. And instead of using my phone to connect to the internet, I now connect to the internet to use my phone.

Well, this trip down memory lane was fun. But now its done, and I have boxes to unpack. Feel free to share your own memories of PCs gone by and raise a glass to MS-DOS… I still have my disks of 6.22, its just a shame that PCs don’t come with 3.5″ floppy drives anymore.

Working From Home

Random Thoughts

I look forward to the new house. There are many many reasons for this, but one of the ones on top has got to be my office. The house is a two story, three bedroom house. The three bedrooms, living room, dining room, kitchen, and two full bathrooms are all on the “top” floor. I put top in quotes because the front door for the house is in the middle of both floors, with a half flight of stairs going up and a half flight going down. Originally the lower level was unfinished leaded some people to describe it as a “raised ranch”, ranch meaning everything on one floor with raised meaning they put a basement under it. Anyway, the bottom floor also has a full bath, but most of the floor is a large media room/living space that has a place where there was (and will be again) a bar. Then there is the garage, also on the lower floor. Originally (I believe) it was a 2 car garage that ran deep, with lots of room for a workshop or something. The previous owners enclosed that part of the garage and made an office. This is going to be my room.

Working from home has always been a problem for me, mostly because there are usually two places to work: my computer desk or in front of the TV. In front of the TV never works. No matter how stupid the show, you can always find something on the idiot box to stare at. My Super Sweet 16 is the most offensive and retarded show ever. I think I’ve seen them all. My computer desk isn’t much better because its where I do all my gaming and stuff. The temptation is just too great. The one thing I’ve always wanted is a room that is more dedicated to work, separated from the TV and my gaming PC where I can be a little more easily focused. So this new room, my office, is going to freaking rock.

Aside from location, the biggest issue with working from home has to be the tendancy to remain in my pajamas. I think some people enjoy doing that, but for me, if I don’t shower and get dressed it will take me about 4 hours to get my day going instead of being able to jump right in. That’s a personal thing to deal with, but I feel that having an office in my house will help with that because since I have to pass through the garage to get to the office, I’ll be more inclined to be dressed, and I can actually make a morning routine of it because I’m still “going to the office” in a manner of speaking.

Sometimes though, I just like going to the office to get out of the house, so even if I am allowed to work from home all the time, I’d still prefer to have a place to go to escape distraction. We’ll have to wait and see what the future holds, but not too long, I should have my home office by the end of the month.

A Focus on Graphics

Gaming

Over at Nerfbat, Blackguard has posted about the need for good graphics in games and its gotten me thinking…

I am one of those people who says that the graphics of a game shouldn’t matter. And to a point, its true. For a really good game, the gameplay should be compelling enough that enjoyment of the game shouldn’t be affected by the graphics. However, as Blackguard points out, graphics are how most people get their first glimps of the game, and advertising is based almost entirely around screenshots with game features coming later more through word of mouth than actual ads.

Where my issue comes in is that I feel that too often the graphics lead the game instead of suppliment or compliment the gameplay. Too many games spend so much time working on realism or fansy shaders and animations, and push the envelope on system requirements, that they lose track of making a game worth playing and that a large enough portion of the public can play. At the rate technology moves, and the fact that game developers keep right up on the bleeding edge most of the time, if you are at all serious about games you probably need to buy a new computer every year, or at least a few hefty upgrades. Of course, not everyone can afford that.

I think one of the major successes of World of Warcraft is that they game runs well on moderate, even low end machines. Personally, I’m running a 1.2GHz Althon with 1GB RAM and a 256MB ATI 9800 video card. It runs very well, except in Ironforge and in open PvP with a hundred or more people running around. I play Half-Life 2 on it also, another success. I tried to play EverQuest 2 on it, and it just died. I got the game to finally run smoothly by turning down the graphics so far that it wasn’t worth my time. 8-bit or Nintendo style graphics I can handle, but fuzzy blobs running around fuzzy blobby landscapes I can’t. City of Heroes ran fairly well. I didn’t have all the highend particles turned on, but not many people do. City of Villains upgraded the graphics engine just enough that I had to tune down the graphics just below the threshhold of “playable”. When the faces lose their eyes, its actually borderline disturbing.

And that leads into another issue I’ve got… why haven’t any companies made a game that actually tunes down? Why isn’t there a slider to reduce polygon counts and use “flatter” textures? Instead, as the sliders move toward the low end, you lose definition and the world begins to look like you forgot to put on your glasses, like a bad runny watercolor painting as things blend and smear into each other.

Perhaps I just need to accept the fact that I need to put in my budget a thousand bucks a year on computer upgrades… no wait, two thousand because I have to upgrade the wife’s PC as well. I can’t imagine having a family and needing to keep three, four, even five PCs up to date. Five grand a year just so the family can continue to game together. It makes you want to go buy some board games…

Odd Things Make Me Laugh

Random Thoughts

I am a child of technology. As I was growing up I had an Atari, a Nintendo, a computer in my house since they became reasonably affordable, and the first thing I did when I got a computer was beg for a modem. Since then, in some way or another, I have been online. One thing I have always found interesting about technology, and specifically being online or the internet, is the terms that get used by the media and by business marketers that rarely if ever get used by the actual users. The big one for me is “Cyberspace”. The only time I have ever used that term has been in a mocking manner, usually when talking about horrid movies like “Hackers” where getting into a computer system is depicted as travelling through a three dimensional flight simulator, as opposed to reality where most hacking is done in code or on the command line. But command lines aren’t sexy.

However, if you have been on the internet or paid attention to it at all you have heard the term “Cybersex”. If you do not know what that is, well, its kind of like phone sex but with typing. Anyhow, with the ongoing need for people with crappy typing skills to shorten everything, cybersex has long since been just referred to as “cybering” or “cyber”. You’ll see this in online games, again, largely in a mocking tone, because people who are serious about it generally do not talk in public about doing it.

This leads us to my work… The IT staff at my current job location are called “The Cyber Team”. So, every time I call them with a problem concerning my PC or a server I’m using, they answer the phone “Cyber Team, this is [insert name], how can I help you today?” and I start to laugh and want to answer with something like “I lick your earlobe, and undo your watch.” It is a fight to get through the call, then I have to take the elevator down twenty-two floors, step out through security and exit the building where I can finally unleash with the gut rending laughter.

Do they not realize what “cyber” has come to mean? Damn them!

Everyone hates the new guy

Random Thoughts

Its just a simple fact of working in the Information Technology field. New guys suck. One, they introduce change into what may be a well oiled machine of work. Two, they never know enough of the specifics to be much help for a while, and the slow you down asking silly questions. And three, they get a better computer.

See, technology moves pretty fast. What was a standard computer last year is this year’s slow model. And this is really what bugs tech guys more than anything. A new guy comes in, and he gets a better PC that the guy who’s been here a while.

Me, I’ve never been the new guy. I’m always the replacement guy. I’m much worse off than even the old guys because I’m replacing someone who has quit or been fired, and I get his junky busted equipment. So, not only do I not get the new guy benefits of a spanking new PC, but when the company does decide to spend some cash and buy new stuff for old guys, I’m not high enough on the totem pole to get one.

Bah!

The World of Warcraft

Gaming

It’s not often that a game really grabs me. I’d played computer games for a number of years, even hauling my PC around to other people’s houses to hook up to a co-ax ipx network to kill each other on an alien planet surrounded by monsters in DOOM. But the first game that really hooked me, that really sucked me in, was Team Fortress. It was a mod for the Quake game that expanded on the idea of deathmatch and capture the flag. Rather than give every person the same weapons, every player got a subset of them, and different health, armor and run speeds. It was capture the flag, but with real team play, because you needed the other players and classes to offset your weaknesses. I played it for 5 years.

I’d just set TF aside… the Quake version was rife with cheats and hacks, and the new version for Half-Life just wasn’t the same… and along came EverQuest. What initially drew me in was its similarity to Team Fortress. No single class was a god among mortals, they all had their strengths and weaknesses, they all had their place. People needed each other, and a great many friends came of it. I played it for 5 years.

Last year I finally closed the door on EverQuest. It had just become more of a chore than a joy. Like most people, I wish I’d quit about 6 months before I did, but then if not for those last 6 months, I wouldn’t have felt like quitting. Heh. So from EQ I went to City of Heroes. I still play. Frankly, I think I’ll always play. Never hardcore, but nothing really compares to being in your heroic spandex and wading in to a room of ten or more villains and emerging victorious by the skin of your teeth. There is a reason I read comic books for so long, and wish that I could still afford to collect. Superheroes fill a void of heroic impulse, stupidity and bravery all wrapped in one, that just can’t be filled anywhere else.

Blizzard created a world many years ago. Off and on, their Warcraft series has always held a place in my ‘frustrated distractions’ category… the games I would play when I was having an off day in my main game. The World of Warcraft, their MMO based in the same world is just… fascinating. The level of detail, the richness of color… its like a fantasy novel come to digital life. The one thing it lacks is that, for the most part, you don’t need other people… you can play solo from beginning to end. Sure you might miss some quests or dungeons, but one should never expect to explore 100% of a game world in an MMO. Heck, 5 years of EQ and I think there are still some places I never went to. But one of the things that it manages to capture so much better than EverQuest ever could, is the simple idea that while I don’t need other people, the things that can be accomplished in small groups, the way the classes compliment each other in so many varied ways… I don’t need other people, but I want other people. So here’s to the next 5 years of gaming.

From the Computer to the Table.

Random Thoughts

EverQuest is one of the most, if not THE most, popular online role-playing games to come alive. And now, if playing it on your PC wasn’t enough, you can, starting this year, play it at home.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, Sony Online Entertainment along with Atlanta’s own White Wolf Studios bring you EverQuest: the Pen and Paper Adventure!

Its been a long time since I broke out the old AD&D books and played a real pen and paper game. The last time I did, I ended a character in a satifactory way. His life, long become corrupt with power, was redeemed and his soul sacrificed for the greater good. That day I walked away from the table, burned the character sheet, and never looked back. And you know what? EQ as a paper RPG is NOT going to make me change that.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the game is going to suck. White Wolf has a good track record in my opinion. And the guys doing this are the same folk who brought you Ravenloft, arguable one of the best gaming modules for AD&D. But honestly, EverQuest is, in its simplest form, an AD&D knockoff for the virtual world. All the fantasy MUDs and MMORPGs are. So I don’t see much how EQ:RPG is going to take the world by storm.

But stranger things have happened…

Browsing and Wasting Time.

Random Thoughts

I remember computer games. One of the first I ever loaded on to a computer was the first of the Zork games. We also had a few of those ASCII text games, and there were things like the Door Games on the BBSs I used to frequent, like Global War, Baron Realms Elite, Trade Wars 2002, and all the other football leagues, war games, and trivia. I didn’t see real computer graphics until The Black Cauldron (you can download it here). I got hooked on Sierra games. King’s Quest, Space Quest, Thexder, Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, and other. And of course as a brainy kid who knew too much triva, I also too to the Carmen Sandiego games. And don’t forget the hours and hours I spent playing The Bard’s Tale (sometimes at night, when its quiet, I still hear the music).

So I’m surfing around the net today, looking for things to keep me busy until my new video card (Thanks Kevin!) shows up so I can try playing Dark Age of Camelot again, and I found this.

Sweeeet.

Taking me back to my days of playing text games like Zork, Stephen King’s The Mist, and this one, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I am sad to see they removed the first step of the game though. I know it personally took me about 4 hours to figure out the proper command to end the repeating of “It is dark.” was “open eyes”. Seems they removed that and jumped right into turning on the light.

It probably better this way, the world needs less insane people.

13 February 2001

Random Thoughts

Been thinking alot lately about jobs.
Been thinking alot lately about jobs.
I just started a new one and, well, I’ve already decided that I don’t “like” this job. I don’t mind going, and it fills the space of the day and makes my money to pay my bills, but its just doesn’t make me smile.
Everyone should find a job they enjoy. I used to think it was enough to enjoy the people who worked with if nothing else, but I just don’t see that anymore because even if you like the people, the little tasks that make the day will slowly drive you insane.
And here I am, slowly being driven insane.
So, how to find a job that I like, that I enjoy.
Well, I often think that I would enjoy working in the computer gaming industry, but to get in the door I have to make one of two sacrifices. Either I scale back my life alot and take a much lower paying job, or I scale back my social life and spend time learning something useful to get a better job in the industry. I like my life outside of work, and making that sacrifice is hard.
Then there is writing, but as with the above, I like my social life and just can’t seem to get myself in a frame of mind to sit and write instead of going out or hanging with friends.
So what do I do?
I’m open to suggestions.