More Echoes

Toto didn’t seem too keen on EoF because the Fae are too small – I don’t usually play tall characters so I don’t really get what he’s talking about – and Ramp still hasn’t managed to find the DVD of the expansion in any stores (not even Walmart?)

Aegis means “goatskin”.

Aside from being KOd by a real nasty bout of flu, I’ve been flitting between WW2 and EQ2. Before you leap up screaming “OMG why aren’t you working on …” – I probably have. Unfortunately my attempts to contribute to the most criticial issues we’re having just now have produced diddly squat. Which shouldn’t be surprizing. Since they’re client issues.

EQ2 has been a real godsend, in that sense (a stress valve). Their handling of this years “Frostfell” seems to be further proof that they are now in-control of their project and that the tail is no-longer wagging the dog. I won’t dish out more flattery than strictly neccessary, since most of the devs I had some connection with have gone off to Green Monster. Damn you! :)

Toto and Ramp haven’t been on EQ2 much so my illusionist on Befallen has been gathering dust. Expecting to be soloing I figured breaking out my Conjuror would be a good call, but just to confound myself, I found a really good Crushbone group with some guys from Aegis of Qeynos and the exp started rolling in. For a while there I really did not expect to keep the group ’cause I kept getting us wiped – I seemed hellbent on finding the little pathing quirks for my pets. And once I got my pet under control, I fluffed up and equal number of times myself.

But not only did they not kick me, they knew who Fansy was too :)

After yesterday’s group I cleaned up my Butcherblock quests and made my first foray into Steamfont. Another nice zone, with a delightful nod to the old EQ1 zone. Today I wasn’t expecting another group invite, but they did me the honor of inviting me to an all Aegis group, and we went into the little Crush dungeon. Awesome little group. Tons of exp and some great drops.

I think I annoyed ’em at first, I commented on the fact it kept saying we’d “discovered” loot items. I thought it was a recurrance of a database issue some of you might recall from a few months back. But apparently one of the loot modes just always does it and they thought I was commenting on the loot mode. And then I sicked my pet on the MTs target way too early and pulled a huge room on us. We survived, but I felt like a real dummy.

I can’t remember who it was that asked, but aegis is from the Greek for goatskin, meaning either a symbollic, regal emblem/shield or a protective influence.

The conjuror class is pretty cool, but I’m still getting my head around the role. I’m so used to either being a support class, and I find myself wanting to think I’m an enchanter. I keep rooting things and wanting to cast slows or debuffs or … or something. I have to admit, frankly, I’m kinda thrilled to find myself grouping too. I’ve been almost afraid to for a long time. And I couldn’t tell you why. Not just in EQ2, in all the games I play.

WordPress abysmal spam manager

Kudos to WP for actually doing a great job on catching spams. But that’s more than negated by the lousy page they give us for checking the marked comments.

The spam comments are displayed whole in a long list. To make searching them easier, they’re divided into pages. You can mark the ones on the current page which aren’t spam. Or you can delete all of them.

Those are your two options.

In short: its a real pain to work with. No option to delete comments, e.g. by page or IP address (most of the spams I get seem to be bulk jobs from the same IP address or block).

You also have to look through the whole bloody length of the comments, which means you invariably wind up scrolling thru them and missing the poor innocent little 1-liner comments that are actually genuine.

IMHO, they should just show the first lines. At least 99% of the comments are identifiable by their first lines. Heck, most of them are identifiable just by their attributes, so showing me all 4000 lines of repulsive sicko porn bait is just annoying.

Great calls by Sci-Fi

Star Trek: First Contact. I was actually watching Spiderman and had been catching glimpses of ‘Trek. The Enterprise E has some of the elegance of Voyager, I like the cameos of the EMH and Neelix. Without wanting to sound like too much of a Trek-geek, it brings together tidbits of trek past-and-present; even knowing many of those tidbits (finding borg wreckage on Earth in Enterprise, for example)  are actually written afterwards.

Starman. Heck, I’m not worthy to comment on its classicness :)

Now lets just hope that they don’t go and spoil it by showing one of their own recent abominations.

5 minutes of “Assy Mcgee”

… was enough to persuade me never to watch Adult Swim again. Not even for Futurama.

Missing C++ operator

Two classes:

class ServerTrackedObject
{
…
  virtual bool
    applyJoulesDamage(class Joules& joules, class Player*) ;
…
};

and

class MobileSpawnSTO : public ServerTrackedObject
{
…
  virtual bool
    applyJoulesDamage(class Joules& joules, class Client*) ;
…
};

The second applyJoulesDamage is supposed to override the former. But the compiler has no way of knowing that so it blissfully continues without so much as a warning.

There needs to be an operator that indicates you want to overload an earlier virtual function, e.g.

overloaded virtual bool applyJoulesDamage(…) ;

So that the compiler can say “Hey, there isn’t an existing vtable entry for this… Dammit.

Patchy patchy patchy…

We have a few extra steps to do today, the first (backing up the database) apparently taking quite a long time to happen.

My videos suck

Found and solved some significant bugs today – and I was takin’ the day off too.

I hadda do a test run of some of the brigade/OIC stuff, figured I’d fraps it for you. ‘s nothing fancy. I dropped a music track on and didn’t bother to check the length until after I’d rendered it. Score :)

My lack of fancy editing means you may have to watch a couple of times to catch the details (some of its in the chat buffer). But at least it’s short and small (3Mb).

Caveats: This is a debug build, so it chugs a little, and I don’t have Ramp’s latest code so it’s not quite the final deal.

Link. (3Mb .wmv file; Windows Media Player 9 or above required)

Valgrind, have my babies?

You’re such a cutsey-wootsey little application you and you make me laugh so much when you pwn teulKit so vicariously.

End of the big freeze

Yesterday when the aircon kicked in, my office dropped to a delightfully Canadian 40f in the space of about 15 minutes. They’ve been starting to call my office the meat locker (though I couldn’t hear them because of the volume of the aircon).

Building guy came in today and tweaked something on the air con and suddenly I can hear the hum of my PCs. I was able to hear Ramp mumbling on the phone. When Doc is talking to someone 5 doors down the hallway, I can hear the Australian in his accent.

Such luxury.