Percolating

I have a bunch of files open in text editors, and I’ve started scribbling on notepads. I hit a bit of a bump in the road with my TOE system design, one of those trivial details that gets changed that happened to be a pivotal choice – Gophur wants, and rightly so, to start with a templated system whereby there are, say, 3 types of Army TOE and each brigade is assigned one type. So far most of the work I’ve done has been prepping related systems so no active code gets changed as a result.

I’d really like to try and get brigade OICs or at least flexible missions up and running alongside TOEs but time is tight and there’s some pretty major under-the-hood work to make either of those happen.

We periodically, and absolutely anonymously, record what CPU features (of MMX, SSE, SSE2 and 3dNow!) are connecting to our servers. Of our PC players: 99.45% have SSE1, 81.2% have SSE2. 51% of them have AMD cpus – so I’m guessing that our SSE2 build will be a significant improvement for 45% of our PC players, and there’s a discussion on-going as to whether we need to build a SSE1 build for the guys who have P4s with poor SSE2 implementations and the ~20% who don’t have SSE2 and could most use a hefty performance improvement.

So I need to find something light to keep me from distracting myself (like my blog entrys have been). It’s sad but on these longer runs I play a very minor part. I get little flashes of the work in progress. It’s a bit like being a reporter outside a mad scientists office, and every now and again he appears at the door and mumbles “Fission!”, you say “amazing! fission of what?”. He starts to explain but more than a few words in and he’s already closing the door and scurrying back to his work…

Weekend play – Eve, EQ2

Played a bit of Eve briefly yesterday, since my free time isn’t up yet. My guy who didn’t follow the “learn hard” rule had a reasonable ship with some good gear on it, so I tried doing his “storyline” mission, only to get a 16 or 20 jump delivery task. I set the ship going and went to get an iced tea, only to come back and find that a large group of pirates were camping one of the gates I had to pass thru who had destroyed me in seconds. (By “find” I mean that I I flew back in my insurance-freebie ship and was destroyed once more by them and sent a delightful “email” by them telling me what a retard I was for coming back for more). Apparently they spend their days sitting at gates destroying everyone who tries to go thru either way. To my WWIIOL attuned PvP senses, its the worst kind of PvP, and from what I gathered the fact that the storyline takes you thru this gate was part of the reason for its selection.

I didn’t like losing my gear. I wasn’t all that attached to it, but the insurance only appeared to cover my ship, not the rather expensive equipment I’d accumulated, and I hadn’t updated my clone to cover the 7 days of “intelligence” I’d been training.

So that’s pretty much the final nail in that coffin for me.

Switched to EQ2 for a while after that only to find that my friend Laccy seems to be dropping out of EQ2. He was a devoted EQ1er, but there’s just something missing in EQ2 that doesn’t give it that same zing.

Granik will mention how the end of EQ2 for him was having gone from deer & beetles at level 1 on newbie island to deer & beetles phase 2 at level 30 in the form of enchanted lands. For me its the enforced repetition. I have 10 quests in this zone, all of which are to kill X many of something. I’ll be lucky if two overlap. But, having finished kill 10 wolves, I’ll get a quest to kill 15 wolves. Or I’ll have a quest to kill 40 bears and another to kill 40 leopards. Find. 80 kills later I return to town, converse with npcs, and move both quests to stage 2 – which is, respectively, kill 50 leopards and 80 bears. That blows.

And just the sheer numbers start to really bog you down. Kill 40x this is just too much. Previously I thought that 4 steps of kill 10x the same mob wouldn’t be so bad, but having experienced it, I have to say I was wrong.