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Behind the scenes of a MMO

Via Slashdot:

Plaguelands has a summary up of the recent MMO roundtable hosted by IBM. Game Developers participating included Geoff Heath, CEO, NCsoft Europe & Steven Reid, NCsoft Europe; Raph Koster, Sony; and Patty Fry, Global Executive, Online Games & DCC.

We’ll ignore the others and focus on some very, very interesting things Mr. Koster mentioned, I highly recommend you jump the link and just read his section.

A bit on pathfinding:

On the tech aspect, something I didn’t know Koster mentions is that 40% of the cpu processing is utilized on pathfinding. Yes, fuckin’ pathfinding. A fuckin’ decade, and almost half of the potential processing powers developers are allocated is used to fuckin’ pathfinding. And you know what? Pathfinding is a joke, it could use a lot of work.

And databases:

Koster also delves into some details about mmos and their databases. The runtime database and the static game database and explaining their differences and how and what needs to be done so developers will have the hardware that allows for more dynamisms, more impact, making that world a virtual living breathing world in itself that players can impact and not just some static sandbox. It’s funny when Raph talks about players having an impact on the world and how we are seeing somewhat of a reversal instead of progressing. Notice how games like WoW do not allow players to drop items on the ground? While this may save a lot of CS headaches, this is the type of simple impact on the persistent world.

Who thinks about these things? Everyone wants to be a developer or a producer, and never thinks about what the programmers have to go through. Fascinating.

I miss IRC

Ah, the good old says when the interweb was young, and to chat in a group required IRC.

Fazin pointed out a quote tonight at the site Bash.org which is just filled with quotes from IRC taking me back to another time. I highly recommend spending an hour and going through their top 100. I was laughing so hard my stomach hurt.

A few favorites I saw:

#406373:

< [TN]FBMachine> i got kicked out of barnes and noble once for moving all the bibles into the fiction section

#9081:

Spin: arrrr, pirates of the south west

Spin: thar be large pipes o’bandwith near ye’ol univarsety.

Pirate: yearg, ye may be an ta somethan thar.

Spin: what say ye we pull yonder USB hard disk longside yonder NMSU puter and begin tha lutin and plunderin.

Pirate: yearg. The master done gaved me a testin machine with a grand ol CDR.

Pirate: Avast!

Pirate: MP3s off the starboard bow!

Spin: stere clear of ye porn pop ups rollin in from tha east.

Pirate: I have mah trusty Opera browsa to help me fend em off.

Spin: encrypt the data holds, batton down thar security patches, argh thar be spyware abound.

#202477:

(Mootar) morons.

(Mootar) these people who live in my apartment complex are connected to my wireless

(Mootar) they must think they’re super-cool hackers by breaking into my completely unsecure network

(Mootar) unfortunatly, the connection works both ways

(Mootar) long story short, they now have loads of horse porn on their computer

#205195:

(mortalkombat) stfu mat|t u cu.nt

* Acaila sets mode: +b MortalKombat!*@*

( @Acaila) FINISH HIM

(mat |t) rofl

(mortalkombat) omg wtf man

  • MortalKombat was kicked by Acaila (forward, forward, back, back, forward, punch)

( @Acaila) FATALITY!

Blog Fixed & Flickr Update

Seems since I did the security update late last week, that one of the fixes changed the permissions on the file that controls the comments, so it errored out and wasn’t accepting comments.

That’s now fixed. For the record, the error was:

Warning: comments_template (wp-content/themes/default/comments.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in (wp-includes/comment-functions.php on line 28)

According to the to the fix on the WordPress Codex it required adding a line to the style.css sheet of a theme so it looked like:

/*<br /> Template: mad1<br /> Theme Name: No Named Art Seed

However, that didn’t work for me.

SSH’ing in, and going to my wp-content directory and typing:

chmod -R 755 themes/ however did work. I don’t know if it’s a permission error on the comments file itself, or the directories, but comments are back.

In related news, I’ve come across some of last years digital photo’s and am in the process of uploading them to Flickr, including the ones from Packer Training Camp last year. So some of the timelines will be out of date for a few days, as I upload them and I’ll finish ’em off with this past weekends Fourth of July photo’s to back in to real-time.

My favorite Packer photo is Robert Ferguson making a spectacular one-handed catch at full extension in the air:

dsc00120

Trent Reznor gets it

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails gets it. It being the remix culture.

Mr. Reznor has released the second single, Only to be remixed. The Hand That Feeds was the first single released, in Garage Band format only at the time.

This time around, it’s been released in 4 different file formats, including Acid Express and Garage Band so Windows users have a shot at remixing this time. I have a copy of the former around somewhere, and the latter on my Mini. I might try my hand at it this time.

It’s very cool of NIN to give back to the community. I downloaded a few of the remixes for The Hand That Feeds last time, and some were pretty good.

Lego Star Destroyer

I remember when the Lego Star Destroyer came out in Christmas of 2002. I begged my wife for one for Christmas. At $300, it was the biggest Lego set to ever be released at over 3000 pieces. I had a vision of assembling it and never taking it apart and setting it on a pedestal…somewhere.

Alas, I never did get one.

Via Wonderland, an old blog post but a good one.

This couple did get a Lego Star Destroyer, and using their webcam at 5 second intervals, took over 4000 shots of them putting it together over 10 hours, including a dinner break. It’s a classic blog post from Jan. of ’03. Alice is right, someone desperately needs to put that to music. At just over 4 minutes, it would be a perfect music video.

Medium and large versions of the video are available here.

Lego Star Destroyer

  • in Humor
  • 1 min read

Smart Advertising

I live about 35 minutes from downtown Minneapolis, pretty far out in the suburbs, in a town of just under 20,000 people called Chaska.

As I’m driving back from dropping the dog off at the kennel (which is really far out there), I see a billboard just outside the Chaska limits for an upcoming GI Joe toy convention in downtown Minneapolis.

Now, I don’t know if they did any market research about who exactly lives in Chaska, or just couldn’t afford a real billboard closer to downtown, say on a busy highway, but I can’t believe that that billboard is going to be effective at all.

Just to give you an idea of how far out I live from Minneapolis:


Google Map from Chaska to Miinneapolis

BurnIt Club

How cool is this – the Burn It club?

I came across Kymberlie McGuire via her Flickr site.

The Burn It Club looks very cool – every quarter she picks a theme, past themes have included driving music, remixes, and school, and you email her to join a group. She puts you in a group of 4, and you make 5 mix CDs (all different artists and songs, just follow the theme), one to keep, one to send to Kymberlie and each person in your group, and you get one in return.

I’ve bookmarked the site and definitely want to join in on that the next time it comes around. What a cool idea.

Cursed, I tell you

I’m cursed I tell you, cursed.

It’s a well known fact in my circle of friends not to let me build PCs. Something always seems to happen. I’d guess I have about a 30-35% success rate on the first try that PC’s I build work.

One of my major goals this week on vacation was to rebuild a few machines, including:

  1. My server
  2. Athlon 64 box
  3. Music backup box which (I think) had a bad video card
  4. Rebuild my wireless network, including my wife’s laptop with a MIMO card

Well, I’ve had a 25% success rate this week. Some vacation.

To recap:

The server: I’ve watched the server die a slow death all week. From the first hard drive failure 6 months ago, I’ve seen the CMOS reset, the BIOS reset a few times, and now booting from the DVD drive isn’t working. I looked into buying a 1U rackmount server today to replace it, but can’t seem to get wife approval yet.

Athlon 64: Swapped out processors and video card (got a sweet deal on a 6800 OC), now getting a 25 or 52 error on the Abit uGuru machine. Need to take the memory out and troubleshoot. Figures.

Music backup box: Success! Swapped out video cards (took the 4200 out of the Athlon 64 since it got a 6800) and bam, no more lockups. Yay.

Wireless Network & Kelly’s laptop: Success and then oops. Wireless network swapped out, got WEP up and running, and went to install the MIMO card in Kelly’s laptop (my old one). Followed directions, installed the drivers first, then put the card in the PCMCIA slot, and the card wouldn’t power on or be recognized. Very weird, as especially for the last year I had been running an Atheros card in that laptop when it had been running Linux as Broadcom built-in wireless sucks. Flashed the bios, and bam, machine won’t power on. HP told me to take it in for service. Wife not happy with me at all, as she wanted it on our trip home this weekend.

Success rate this week: 25%. To top it all off, I had powered off my desktop to do some cable management, and when I powered it on to go to HP’s site for support, I got 2 non-system disk errors. Was reaching for a LiveCD when I rebooted one mroe time and it came on. I was pretty livid at that point.

Moral of the story? Don’t let me touch your PC. Ever.