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State of Fear

Reviews

This book, State of Fear by Michael Crichton, scares the crap out of me, and its not even a horror novel. The topic of the book? Global Warming. Now, it is a fiction novel, detailing a fictitous lawsuit against the EPA and a tangled web of espionage and adventure as the lawyer of a billionaire environmentalist gets pulled into a crazy plot to engineer difinative proof that global warming is a dire threat to all of humanity.

But why does it scare me? There is a point in most people’s lives when they finally come to an understanding of just how little we, the human race, really know about how our world works. And I am not talking about just a personal realization, because I had that many years ago when I discovered that I did not know everything. I am talking about how much science is going on and how little actual certainty there is about what they are studying, especially when it comes to complex systems like global climate.

The book reads like any other thriller type novel, but right at the beginning there is an author’s note that states “references to real people, institutions, and organizations that are documented in footnotes are accurate.” And the paperback copy of the book contains a 32 page bibliography. So while reading the book, I didn’t take everything Michael Crichton chose to spoon feed me. I looked up the books and articles and read some of them myself, and I read others not used in the book, and in doing this research I ultimately came to the same conclusions about the material as he did when it came to writing his book: the media and politicians exaggerate the hell out of conjecture and dish it up as solid fact. When you read a bunch of the data, you come to realize that it is very possible that we might one day have another ice age, or that we might have a global drought with searing heat, but that we cannot conclusively say which or what is going to happen because these is alot of data out there and it points in every conceivable direction and we do not know all the variables yet. Global warming could be very real, but right now we have evidence that supports it and refutes it, in fact if you restrict your view to the data that global warming supporters throw out you would be lead to believe that the planet is actually cooling. And what really gets to the core of why this book scares me is that the world is making policies based on conclusions that are not fully realized, that cannot be fully realized.

I highly recommend this book, and I also recommend reading up on what is really going on in the world. Do not settle for what the TV tells you.

Survey: Question Number Three

Gaming

In most MMO games today, your character has lots of hit points and you get hit a few dozen times before you go down. In pen & paper systems, your character tends to have lower hit points and depends largely on misses, blocking and resists to survive; getting hit a couple or three times can put you in the dirt. So the question is, which system would you prefer to play in, one where you have hundreds or thousands of hit points and get hit for small amounts often and large amounts infrequently, or one where you have dozens of hit points and get missed mostly and hits are more critical in nature?

To a degree, playing in a large number system is more… calming. I get hit and I shrug it off. I have 5,000 hit points and the monster I’m fighting only hits for 50, so I can get hit 100 times before I fall. Mathematically, it allows for a steady, normalized, progression of damage that leads to character death. With the occasional spike of spell damage to keep you on your toes. However, like other things, I’m a bit tired of this system because it is so prevalent.

The other method is more tense. Miss, miss, miss, block, dodge, miss, dodge, miss, block, HIT! Crap! I just lost half my hit points! Miss, miss, block, miss, block, block, dodge, miss, miss, dodge, HIT! Almost dead! Not gonna make it! Block, block, dodge, miss, dodge, miss, miss, miss, miss, dodge, block, enemy falls over dead. Whew! I made it!

I don’t know. It just seems to me that if it worked that second way, I’d care more, I’d be less tempted to do some AFK fighting. What do you think?

Vandals

Random Thoughts

If you read my entry about my wedding, you’ll recall that my car got broken into. If you have read my weblog for a decent length of time you’ll know that this is the fourth time in just over a year that my car has been broken into. The first time, they broke a window. The second time, they broke a window and stole my stereo. The third time, they broke a window, bent the dividing bar between two paines of glass and stole my stereo. This last time, they jammed something in the lock, pushed down until the lock popped, then stole my tire gauge, a multi-tool and three packs of gum.

I have insurance. Sometimes I pay the monthly on it and I think to myself, “What a waste of money!” For many years I paid and got nothing out of it… well, my insurance has 100% break glass coverage, so maybe twice over the years I had my windshield replaced because of a crack caused by road junk. Each time my car was broken into my insurance has paid for it. Each broken window was replaced. Each stereo was upgraded. And when I get around to buying a new tire gauge and multi-tool, they’ll refund me for that too. All in all, as I’ve seen the bills for these pass through my hands, the amounts of damage have been fairly small. Even without insurance I’d have covered it just fine. This time that changed.

I wish I had a picture to show, but the damage to my car looked minor. The door panel around the lock looked bent, and the lock itself wouldn’t turn when the key was put in. However, the lock mechanism worked just fine from the inside, and did in fact lock the door. So when I dropped the car off to have it fixed, covered 100% for vandalism by my insurance, I figured they’d hammer out the door, maybe have to replace the lock cylinder. I was wrong.

In the end, they had to replace the lock (which also involved rekeying the lock to match my key), replace a bunch of stuff inside the door, hammer and repaint the door panel (repainting meant redoing the trim and decals as well), and a handfull of other things. $791. Anyway, I’m glad for my insurance.

There is, however, one thing that my insurance can’t replace, and its something I may never get back. I don’t like driving any more. Driving somewhere means parking, even at my own home (this last break in was literally right outside my front door), and parking means leaving my car unattended, which leads to anxiety upon returning to my car. As I approach my vehicle now I’m looking at the windows for breaks, checking the doors for damage, nervously looking in the window to see if my stereo is still there or if my glovebox has been rifled through. Its been suggested that I get an alarm, but even with the alarm my anxiety wouldn’t go away, it would just be a different anxiety… all the break in stuff plus a new “Is my alarm working?” anxiety. I don’t even want to own a car anymore. And I don’t think this feeling will go away until I catch someone trying to break into my car and I beat them soundly before calling the police.

Or perhaps witness a thief getting caught, because I think part of my issues stems from the lack of concern I get from police. I understand that they hear this stuff alot, and that there is so little evidence and statistically my missing objects will never be recovered, but they always take the report with such indifference, they never collect any evidence, they just fill out the form and leave. They never say if there have been a rash of break ins lately and their working the case or anything like that. In fact, the last two times my car was broken into they didn’t even come, instead just took my information over the phone. The is no compassion, no “bedside manner”. I’ve just bee violated, my car vandalized and items stolen and they don’t say a single thing to possibly help me get beyond it. Facts, forms and forgotten.

I guess, all that I really want, is when it happens, for someone in authority to tell me its going to be all right, even if it isn’t true.

Sharper Than A Serpent`s Tooth

Reviews

My guilty pleasure returned with Sharper Than A Serpent’s Tooth, another book in the Nightside series by Simon Green. As always, it was a fun little escape with interesting characters and plenty of action. I’ve reviewed this series before, so check out those if you want more details on the books.

As a side note to this review and something someone brought up on a message board I frequent… its a shame that books are getting really huge these days. Even kids books like Harry Potter and the Artemis Fowl books are clocking in at over 300 pages, with many books screaming past 500. There is nothing wrong with long books, in fact sometimes good long book like one of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books is exactly what I need. But its also nice to sit down and blow through a 200 page or less book, get in, get down to the story, and get out. The Nightside books drew me in because they were well written and short. One book, a half dozen hours of reading. Is it because there is less of a market for shorter books? Is it editors demanding thick novels? Or is it authors running wild? No answers here, except that I think one of the ideas I’m working on will be a series of short books, not huge bricks.

Combat Skills

Gaming

One thing I feel is really lacking in pretty much all MMORPGs is actual player skill. With their simplistic auto-attack or even button/click feat based scenarios there is very little room for the player to really control how good their character is at fighting. Even in games like City of Heroes where there isn’t really an auto-attack, your skill is hamstrung by the limitations of the game mechanics, which in CoH is the recharge time and choice/placement of expansion slots.

FPS games are all about skill. Well, except when the game allows scripting/macroing. People who used the rocket-jump scripts in Quake were cheaters in my book, people who did it without a script were talented. But that aside, every player runs the same speed and has access to the same weapons, and what separates the players is how well they use the guns and know the maps.

However, in making combat more skill based, I don’t want to lose the players who actually prefer auto-attack. So consider this…

The default configuration is auto-attack. You equip a sword and run up to the monster and hit attack. Your weapon will do average damage, perhaps with a random chance to score a critical hit and do double damage. This model is enough to play the game. You won’t be the best in the world, but you will do alright. Then, on an option screen, you are able to select several levels of skill based control. For example, you can choose the “fighting style” method which presents your character with a list of pre-set sword grip and fighting styles. Each style has advantages and disadvantages, base-lined on the auto-attack, and you select them and use them. Then on the furthest end of the scale is “complete control” where your joystick controls your sword arm and your keyboard moves your feet, you gain the ability to move the sword in whatever way you choose to hamstring opponents or stab at the eyes, but you also have your damage affected by your movement because “strafing” around a target you’ll have much less power than if you plant your feet and put your whole body into the swing.

It would obviously take alot of effort to work out all the details, but the gist is that you allow the player to decide how much skill they want to use in the game. The less skill they use, the move “average” their character is; the more skill, the more chances for heroics.

Faster Food

Random Thoughts

I think at the point the thing that angers me the most when I go to eat fast food is the inability of the person at the register to type in exactly what I order. I’ve been eating at Wendy’s restaurants for a long long time, and in that time I have learned their keypad so that I order exactly the way that it must be keyed in. “Junior hamburger with mustard and pickles only.” On the register, all the guy needs to do is hit the junior hamburger button, then the mustard button, then the pickles button and finally the “only” button. Simple. So why do I still get burgers with onions, mayo, ketchup, cheese and/or lettuce on them? I look at the screen and I see that the person working the grill has made my burger to order, the problem being that my order says “Junior cheeseburger with ketchup and onions.”

This is why I get frustrated… I have done everything in my power to eliminate mistakes and yet the people working the register keep messing it up. The other workers to their job correctly, but the person I deal with gets it wrong screwing up the whole chain. Argh!

So, I’m at Wal-Mart and I’m buying two things. Instead of waiting in the ridiculously long lines (because they have three registers open with fifty customers), I head to the self check-out. Beep-beep, scan, beep, bag, scan, beep, bag, credit card, done. And I’m out. This is what fast food places need. Remove the cashiers, they are outdated. Spin the register around, let me punch in my order, swipe my card or insert my bills (provide change if needed) and print me a receipt. Then I proceed to the window and pick up my order when my number is called.

Wendy’s, Burger King, McDonald’s? Any of you guys reading this? As a bonus, it means all the cash is inside the machine in the wall. No more sticky fingers from the employees. No more store hold ups because there is no drawer for them to open. I’m telling you, wave of the future. Wave of the future.

One Day in February

Random Thoughts

On February 27th at 5:30 PM, Jodi and I got married. But it was one heck of a day…

The morning began like any other day… waking up, getting dressed, discovering my car had been broken into. They took my digital tire pressure gauge, a leatherman multi-tool and three packs of gum. They left behind the stereo, the CDs and the $15 in change in the ash tray. However, having somewhere we needed to be, Jodi and I decided we’d report the theft later and for now just empty the car, lock it back up and leave it, seeing as how the thieves were kind enough to not break any windows but just jimmy the lock in such a way as to render it useless on the outside but still operate inside and lock the door just fine.

We loaded up the other car and headed off to some friends’ house, K and P, the ones we’d roped into being our chauffeurs and valets for the day. Once all packed into their car we began the long journey from Atlanta to Savannah.

Upon arriving in Savannah, we were nervous. We needed to check into our hotel early… at noon, but the woman on the phone had said check in was 4pm, 3 at the earliest. Score one for our team as the rooms were ready and we checked in. But another strike for the day, P forgot his suit and has no pants.

Quickly we decide to head to the mall and buy some, he can do without a suit jacket, but he needs pants. Also, Jodi needs a bouquet, so she called up Flowerama (listed in the hotel service guide) and arranges for one over the phone. The shop is on Abercorne which is only a few blocks away. So we pile back into the car and head out. We drive past at least a dozen flower shops and finally reach the mall. We stop, buy P some pants at Macy’s and the girls get their nails done at Le Nails. Back on the road, we keep driving. Finally we find Flowerama. Basically, the farthest point you can get from our hotel while remaining in Savannah, that’s where it is.

Its obvious we are going to be late meeting up with the photographer at 4 PM as planned, so we call and ask to meet at 4:30. She’s fine with it and we get back to the hotel with plenty of time to get ready. While Jodi is putting on makeup, she spills some which I start cleaning up. Crawling around on the floor I didn’t realize that I had gone under the coffee maker drawer and WHAM! I get a nice little red whelt on my head that starts bleeding a little. But fine, we can cover that up or I can just make sure I don’t look down in the photos. Finally I start getting dressed, I open my suit bag and scream something like “Where are my pants?!”

Up until this point, I had totally kept my cool. Now I lost it. I was swearing like a sailor, I wanted to punch and break things, I was going to drive back to Atlanta and kill everyone at the Men’s Warehouse for forgetting to put my pants in with my suit jacket… when I realize… I’m looking at my sport coat. I packed the wrong bag.

I throw my jeans back on and run next door to K and P’s room.

Me: We have a problem. I don’t have my suit.
P: That’s not funny.
Me: I have a sport coat, which is fine, but I don’t have pants.
P: Oh my God, you’re serious?
Me: I’m going to go find pants, Jodi is going to need some help.

And I run to the lobby. I speak with the concieges and explain my predicament. The woman there just goes blank and mutters something about Banana Republic and the Gap. Then the man steps up and tells me to step out the doors, turn left, go down to Broughton, hang a left and a few blocks down will be J. Parker Limited who can hook me up. I run out of the hotel.

At J. Parker Limited I walk in and explain my dilemma. The man there calmly asks, “What color?” I tell him black and he asks, “What size waist?” I answer him and he turns around, flips through the rack he’d been leaning on and pulls out a pair of pants. I try them on. Perfect fit. He marks them, I take them off, and he hands them to the tailor. While we wait we talk about weddings. He thinks we are right in just running off, big weddings are a hassle. He tells me a story of a bride with a $6,000 Irish linen dress whose reception runs out of booze before the wedding party arrives who should have gotten a $500 dress, lied about what it was made of and spent the other $5,500 on more drinks and food. Because honestly, as long as the dress looked good would anyone care that it was Irish linen? As we talked and laughed, my body slackened and I calmed down. Fifteen minutes of waiting at the pants were done. I thanked both him and the tailor and headed back to the hotel.

Everyone else was ready. I got dressed, threw my tie over my shoulder, and we headed to Factor’s Walk, the location our photographer picked for the ceremony. On the way we went over everything. Rings? Check. Checks for the officiant and photographer? Check. Marriage paperwork? … So I sent everyone ahead and ran back to the hotel for the papers.

Finally, I catch back up to the group. We chat a moment and then I inform them that I can’t tie a tie. P makes a valiant effort, but fails. The Reverend Steven P. Schulte steps in and does it up right. I think this is where the laughter started.

We moved out on to the bridge for the ceremony and took a few quick photos. Then the photographer, Nancy Heffernan, moved off to a spot to take shots during the ceremony. Since we had no time to rehearse, Nancy resorted to yelling out instructions as they were needed. “Get closer!” “Back up!” “Not you!” “Move to your left!” “Your other left!” We couldn’t stop laughing.

Reverend Schulte said the words, we exchanged vows, I gave Jodi her ring, she gave me mine… which got stuck halfway over the knuckle. We were going to just force it on when my finger turned purple. Quickly I fought the ring off and left my ring finger red and throbbing. We put the ring on my pinky and vowed to resize it later. We finally managed to stop laughing long enough for Rev Schulte to pronounce us man and wife, and we kissed. We were married.

After the ceremony, we hung around the park at Factor’s Walk for a while taking photos. Then we strolled River Street, getting congratulated by the passerbys and taking more photos until the light faded. We went back to the hotel for Nancy to burn us CDs of all the photos she had taken.

Earlier in the day we had made reservations at Elizabeth on 37th, but now none of us wanted to get in the car and drive somewhere. Nancy suggested Vic’s On the River, which happened to be not fifty feet from where we got married. When Nancy left, we headed out again on foot and went to Vic’s. The atmosphere and the food were excellent, and we sat and ate and chatted over the day’s events and laughed.

I think that if my wedding had been better planned and gone more smoothly, the day would practially fade to nothing in my memories. I’d remember that I got married, and I’d look at the photos and recall some of the day. But the wedding I had… I don’t think I’ll forget a single thing.

A New Project

Random Thoughts

I’ve started up a new project I’m calling “The Game That Never Was”. It is basically just a collection of my thought on what would make the perfect MMORPG. Some of those ideas can be found here on my weblog under the Gaming heading, and I’ll be integrating those into TGTNW eventually. Until then, when I add something new to it, I’ll also include on the index of Probablynot.com a discussion or explanation as to why I came to that idea or decision.

Anyway… enjoy.

Personal Space in Games

Gaming

In MMORPGs, one of the decisions that gets made in their design is whether or not to give player characters personal space, or as I usually call it a “bounding box”.

EverQuest had a bounding box. Two people could not pass directly through one another. This caused issues when popular NPCs, like bankers, would get mobbed by players resulting in people who could not get close enough to interact. And sometimes this caused huge uproars when it came to doorways and other tight spaces. It was not uncommon to see an ogre in the Plane of Knowledge sitting in the bank doorway being an ass and demanding to be paid to move. It had other uses too, on my server there was at least one incident of using an orge to block a passage way into raid content, denying competition to a second group to a raced spawn.

Of course, going with no bounding box at all can cause just as much issue. In World of Warcraft players have no personal space. This is great when it comes to the auction house because there will commonly be fifty people trying to crowd around the one NPC. The drawback comes in PvP combat. A spell caster has to keep his target in his field of view to cast, so in order to interrupt casting all a melee player needs to do is run right up, step through the caster, then step back. In about a second the target goes from being in front, to 180 degrees behind, back to front again. Even with good reflexes and high speed mouse control, its very hard not to lose the spell cast, and for a melee player with a slow two handed weapon he won’t even miss a swing while he two-steps the caster’s blast into interruption.

What I would suggest is that instead of strictly making the bounding box a property of the character object, also make it modifiable by the surroundings. Make it so that in a defined area, around an NPC or doorways to buildings or narrow hallways in dungeons, the player becomes “intangible” and other players can pass right through them, and while not in those areas, players have a seeming mass and cannot be stepped through.

And with this, I kick off my section “The Game That Never Was“, which is going to be a collection of ideas that I have about what would make the perfect MMORPG.

The Wizard Knight

Reviews

I don’t want to be overly harsh here. But ultimately, I didn’t like The Knight and The Wizard, the two volume tale The Wizard Knight by Gene Wolfe. However, your tastes may vary, so if you see it in the book store, flip through the first few pages and see for yourself.

Now, why didn’t I like them?

The story was pretty good: a boy crosses into another world, one of giants and ogres and more, and becomes a man and a knight. Fairly typical, but with some interesting twists, like this world isn’t just one world, it’s seven worlds that layer over one another and the normal world, as far as normal goes in a fantasy setting, is smack in the middle, with three worlds above and three worlds below. Plenty of the characters were likable, and overall I enjoyed meeting them throughout the tale.

The one drawback, and to me it was huge but may not affect other readers as much, was that the entire story, across both books, was told as if the main character was writing down what happened in an enormous letter to his brother, back in our world (you know, the one we live in, without magic and dragons). As such, almost the entirety of the two books feels like someone is telling you a story, so as much as I wanted to get immersed in this world I was constantly kept at arms length by the writing style. It bugged me.

Along with this was also the author’s choice of weird formal language. The following is NOT an excerpt from either book, but is just an example of how many conversations go within the story:

“I have something that I must tell you, and I need you not to ask me questions while I do.”
“That is fine, but before you start I must know how you got here?”
“I came in a strange manner which will be clear when I tell you what I must tell you.”
“Then I will hinder you no longer. Tell me your story.”
“The story I am about to tell is strange and you may not believe me, but I ask you to trust that I am telling the truth of it.”
“I will take you at your word as I have no reason to doubt you.”
“I knew that you would as you are a trusting man. Here is my tale…”

About a third of every conversation between characters was verbal foreplay, telling each other that they want to tell each other things, interrupting each other to say things that didn’t need to be said at all. Now, this actually happens in real life. You are sitting with your friends at the local pub and you say, “Hey, I’ve got to tell you this story about work.” And they say, “Its not about the copy machine again is it?” And you say, “No, it isn’t, and if you let me tell the story you’d know that.” However, in real life this doesn’t happen all the time. In the book it happens all the time. It got to the point where I would literally see it coming and then skip two or three paragraphs to get to the point where the foreplay is done and the real conversation would begin.

Despite the style of the writing though, I did enjoy the world Gene crafted in his two volume tale. So, as I said before, if you see the book in the store, read a few pages, maybe a chapter or two, and if the writing style doesn’t bother you, pick up the books, it’ll be worth it. If the style bothers you, pick these up only if you are into world crafting and don’t mind it not being a smooth easy read.