New WAR Videos!

It's like getting Christmas all over again! Just in case you're not sure, yes I will be playing this to the point that I might need an intervention. Hoowah Shadowclan!

Warhammer Online at MMORPG.COM

Viruses, Infections, Spyware, Trojans and Adware.

Just in case you missed it V.i.s.t.a. is going live today and before you ask, no we will not be supporting it by tomorrow. Despite the fact that the nVidia driver is still not released today and there is no hope in sight for a Creative driver, by all accounts Vista is not running games as fast as XP and let's be honest, WWIIOL doesn't need to be any slower. The good news is that despite all the hooplah spewing from Bill today, M$ knows Vista isn't ready and has already announced plans to release SP1 in a few short months.

To be honest, I kinda dig on the new OS. I've installed it with luck about 50% of the time. Those machines run the game great. The other installs I've done are simply plagued with issues including the mysterious rebooting video driver. Oh joy. So if you are one of those uber dorks like I am who have a tidy system with good parts, you're probably Ok. If on the other hand you can't name the model number of your mobo and report from memory the exact date of your current bios upgrade, you should probably hold off. Oh and if you think you can trust this thing, you're crazy. Maybe AMD's works better, its your life, take a chance.

Seriously!

This month the Escapist mag is covering Serious Games. Believe it or not, we're in the serious games genre as often as not. I haven't had a chance to read through the articles yet but I am interested in the topic. In my time here at the company I've had the opportunity to work on several cool projects with a serious bent. I remember meeting with a bunch of pentagon suits in D.C. one time and they wanted to use the game or a variant of it to track :"emergent behavior". I also remember stories from Killer about being at ITSEC and hearing brass and suits complain to their underlings: "look at that, 18 months and 7 million dollars" as they looked at our game. They naturally were comparing it to their own bloated and failed projects that couldn't show a helicopter and infantry in the same simulator. Read on then for more about serious games. I'm sure they aren't all war sims, just the fun ones.

The Escapist - Issue #82

P.S. The Escapist is one of those terribly laid out web sites that I can hardly stand to read. PDF here.

First Spawn Camp Evar!

Spawn camping always gets a bad rap in our game. Whenever you use the metaphor of spawning into the world instead of inhabiting entities that pre exist in the world you're gonna get spawn camping of some flavor. Of course in real war, one of the major objectives is to find the location of your enemy and obliterate him with as much advantage as you can leverage so its pretty much the same thing. Great pic.

Rat-a-tat-tat!

Reminder for me to read this a couple of times. I haven't really done any sound engineering since college and I think that now that we have 2 outstanding volunteers doing new sounds we might make a lot of progress this year. Killer is managing them so that should be a nice feature set that doesn't get crushed under my overload. My boss rocks.

Free Games

Man I love Reaper Minis. They're here in Dallas and we've had many an opportunity to go over there and hang with them and game it up. It's been a while, granted, and we never really got that project off the ground but... Today, Greg pointed out that Reaper has some free Dwarfstar games up for the D/L. Super, uber sweet. Now the only question is, which one first.

Badge of Blood

If you don't know about Badge of Blood, it's a Half-Life based game being created by a few members of our community. I've talked several times with Yoda about it at various conferences and telephone calls. I'm always interested in indy projects and more than happy to offer any advice I can. Anyhoo, I got a google alert this morning about a new Badge of Blood interview on Halflife2.net but it seems to be a dead link. maybe Yoda got slashdotted...hey! It could happen. If you have any info on the story I'd appreciate it. Gonna be a little too busy today testing live code fixes for that collision stutter bug that seems to have been plaguing us since the intro of bouncing grenades to go digging the intrawebz for info. Hopefully we'll get a couple other minor changes in as well. See ya in the Read Me...

Priceless

Bufalo sent this to me over the Holiday. Priceless indeed.

Nice shiny fairly new high powered rifle: $750

High/Variable powered scope: $300

Bore Sighting device: $150

Being the dumbass who forgets to remove the bore sight prior to shooting: PRICELESS