kiby's posterous

Moved!

I can now be found here, and in Swedish: http://kiby.se/

The #fail of LOTRO

I like Lord of the Rings Online, I really do. Then we decided to get a guild (kinship) started, mostly so we could share our class specific gear and loot with each other, in the shared bank that always comes with creating a guild in other game. LOTRO however, has chose another path. A more retarded path.

There is no shared bank. When the guild becomed level 7 you can purchase a kinship house (awfully expensive of course) and put shared storage inside it. Houses also have upkeep, so this is a very, very bad feature for small and not hyper dedicated guilds. Like most guilds honestly. They do have another cool feature though. Kinship Auction. When you put up an item to be auktioned away, you can set it so that only your guild mates can buy it, and I though "great, then you can set a really low price and we can still share stuff". But no, that would be to un-retarded I guess. So how do they break this? Each item you put up costs 20 silver. You might not know what that means in the world of LOTRO, but trust me, it's way too much.

I guess we'll just have to keep mailing stuff around, because it would really hurt me to throw away a cool weapon recepie just because I'm not a weaponsmith. The game is good enought hat I still want to play it, but I must that the bank system is really, utterly just bad for players, and I cannot fathom why they don't want us to give stuff to each other. It does not make me want to spend money, do you hear me middle-earth?

Lord of the Rings Online

It's gone free-to-play and a few of my colleagues have started playing, so I thought I'd take a look and see what's happened since the beta. What I remember from that was that it was confusing to find quest locations, plus it was cool to smoke. I'm donwloading the latest version right now, and it takes AGES even though they have some nity p2p tech going. I'm looking into the payment choices while I wait. I kindof like it. In the pic below you have VIP/PREMIUM/FREE, in order. VIP pays every month, premium can pay trough in-game money if I get it right, and free is free. In all varieties you can purchase stuff in the game to make the characters life a little easier though. Increse the money limit and the amount of bags for example. If I decide to do this, I'm definitley going to get more bags. It's very nice of them to let everyone play all races and classes though. With the exceptin of the premium classes, that all payment levels have to pay for. I'm not sure which those are yet though.

I can imagine playing this for quite some time. I have my Fallen Earth subscription running as well, and you can't really play two MMO's at once imho, but at this point I don't really miss FE. I think it might be a tad too hardcore for me. I'm glad that I've actually found a game like that, but it makes me wonder who is playing it, because I was so hardcore at one poit that I played every MMO I could get my hands on, and I loved the grind. I was actually playing one Korean MMO before it was translated. I think it was RF Online. I know it wasn't Silkroad Online or Mu Online though, I played those in English.

Oh and no, I do not know any Korean.

Games for iPhone? No can do.

To program games for an iPhone, you actually need a mac. Silly me, I never thought of that! I've always been very sceptical towards Apple for their extremely pricey hardware and rigid policies regarding replacing parts and handling stuff on your own, but when I needed a new phone last spring, it seems like there was no real competition, it was an iPhone that was the way to go. It's not the same though. In phones I don't care. I don't want to replace parts myself, and I don't mind if the OS is not very customizable as long as I like it from the start. The way this develops I'm going to have to start thinking about getting a mac though. It would go great with my phone and my soon-to-be iPad... I could program games for them and really get into it. Maybe.

For now I still program on my PC though, and I've gotten to classes, constructors and destructors. Love this old book I'm learning from. Most examples are game related, so I feel just at home. What better example of a class than a bow for example? With the methods fire() and draw(), and data members color and arrows. Just SO useable! I'm not even sarcastic! I really want to be able to make an rpg some day, programming, graphics and all. Then I will feel complete.

Goblins and Guns

The next chapter in my programming quest took me to a very simple cave adventure game. Fighting goblins and finding treasure, it's almost enough to
ease the longing for Diablo 3.

Not really though, so I've been playing other game in the meantime. I try to muster my enthusiasm for Red Dead Redemption, but it just feels a bit hollow.
On paper it should be awesome, but then the challenges are a bit weird,the controls less than perfect and the main character does just not feel real.
Not to talk about the annoying random missions that show up. A man runs up to me, says "They are going to hang my brother, please help!". I follow him,
and five men instantly shoots and kills me before I even get so close that I can verify his story. Now if the save system were less rigid, it would not be too much of a hassle, but I need to camp to save, and maybe I do not do that often enough, because ever time six hours pass, and I like to hunt when I can see, thank you very much!
So, I've just stopped doing these random missions unless I JUST saved, because I've tried about four or five varieties, and they all have the possibility to end badly.
The rewards are just not worth it.

I'm going to give it a couple more night though, because I do see potential. If I just learn to master the dead-eye and knife...

Heaven & Hearth

A huge world with no maps other than the ones you create with the map making skill. At first, there is just nature, but then the players are unleashed, and start to reshape the world. Creates villages and deforests large areas to make a living. You can choose to be a farmer, make wine, bread or clothes, or perhaps you'd like to be a hunter and explorer? There is always the choice to steal from and murder other players too. If you kill someone, they stay dead...
It's not a game for everyone, but so far it's been keeping my interest. Needs more development, sure, but it's made by two guys and the server was at one of theirs homes until very recently, so I'll cut them some slack.
Check it out here: Heaven and Hearth

Cursed Recursives

So, whats wrong with this code?

int menu(void){

//enter stuff here

    while(money <1 && userResponse > 0 && userResponse < 3){
        cout<<"You do not have money, so you can't really make a bet..."<<endl;
        menu();
    }
return userResponse;
}

Well, recursive is a dangerous path, and I fell for the trap. Apparently when you have a local variable (userResponse) in a recursive function, each call gets it's own unique version. So in effect, it won't update the second time the function is called. So if userResponse is 2, making my while loop valid, it will stay two, no matter what I set it till when I call menu() again.
The solution is to update the local variable inside the while loop, like this:

    while(money <1 && userResponse > 0 && userResponse < 3){
        cout<<"You do not have money, so you can't really make a bet..."<<endl;
        userResponse = menu();
    }

I was about ready to give up before I called in the boyfriend (who is an excellent programmer) and made him help me. I just have no patience...
Wouldn't have figured it out on my own any time soon though.

To Learn Programming

If I'm going to be a serious games programmer, I'll need to learn C++. I've tried it before and failed, so we'll see what happens this time.
I'm going to read a book for starters, and do the exercises and so on. The book is rather old and just covers direct x 8 though, so I'll have to switch at that point.
Maybe I should learn openGL instead/also, but lets just start with the stuff that comes before graphics first...

I've now surpassed the "hello world" level. Yay me!

#include <iostream>

int main() {
  std::cout << "Hello World!" << std::endl;
  return 0;
}

Beads

I've made lots and lots of these things. Mostly the pixel game character variety, but some bracelets as well.
The bracelet kind is rather hard to bend just the right way, I may need to get a mold of my wrist.
Wow, that was actually a rather good idea! Thanks for making me write this so I figured it out.

Ok, as for a taste of the game stuff I made:

Diablo 3

The video on Kotaku where they talk about artisans ans crafting in Diablo 3 nearly made me drool. Well everything D3 does that really, but still! More of an actual crafting system than WoW, but still feels in character. I can't wait to get out there and start collecting items, transmute and sell and.. oh just give me the game already. I bet it won't come out for another two years or something.

On the list to play until D3:

Guild Wars 2 - Pretty, pretty game that supposedly will take the grind out of MMO's. Some people might argue that this is not even an MMO, but we'll see. The fun is what is important after all.

Old Republic - Well, I did love Star Wars Galaxies immensley until they ruined it, and I also love Knights of the Old Republic I & II, so this might just be... Awesome.

Mass Effect 3 - Ok, the link is for 1 & 2 so far, but I bet they will relase the thisd one before D3... If you have not played it, notice the demo download links. I need to replay ME to get a better save for ME2, to get a better save for ME3. Good stuff.