Wurm Team Blog » Wolfram

I blame Tich

Wolfram — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:21:28 +0000

I’ve not been very active lately, and it’s all Tich’s fault.

She happened to mention to me that she was thinking about buying a new game on the weekend, Dragon Age: Origins.

So I googled it and found this review video:

http://au.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/dragonage/review.html

I thought to myself that it was exactly the kind of game I liked, similar to Baldur’s Gate. Turned out that it should have come as no surprise to me that it was like BG since it’s made by the same people. Anyway, I was intrigued enough that I jumped onto steam and bought the game then and there. Since then I’ve been completely captivated by this game, and have not found much time for Wurm. Therefore, it’s all Tich’s fault. Just kidding.

Anyone who is interested in the game should be warned that I see lots of posts on the forum saying that people are only taking 40 hours to finish it. Sounds like they should be playing wurm if 40 hours is too short. There must be some accounts that are up to 200 days or more in wurm by now.

Anyway, I’m upto 89 hours and the game says I have explored 39% of the world and done 28% of the game, but I’m very thorough in these types of games, so it’s not surprising that I have a much higher time than the speed players. Also, they do say that the game is very re-playable, since it has 6 origin stories, 4 endings and you can literally and figuratively take different paths through the game’s plot. You can do the major plot points in a different order as well since the game’s combat system seems to scale quite well according to your level.

The dialogue makes me cringe sometimes, but this isn’t exactly Shakespeare, and most of the time it’s pretty entertaining. I’ve also recognised a few of the voice actor’s voices from favourite tv shows.

Like Claudia Black from Farscape and SG1, whoever played Tuvok & Captain Janeway from Voyager, and there was another, but I forget whom atm. Of course most of the voice acting is top notch, so that makes up for any bad dialogue. The graphics are pretty good too, both the scenery and the models.

Anyway, I know this isn’t wurm related, but when I tried to log in tonight and found that my premium had expired, I thought I should let ppl know why I’m not around much atm. Plus, it’s xmas and I work in retail.

http://dragonage.bioware.com/

Where I bought it from. Australian players should note that with the current US dollar exchange rate, buying it on steam is a pretty good deal, if you can afford the download, it’s 8.9gb:

http://store.steampowered.com/search/?term=Dragon+Age%3A+Origins

On a side note, Artashes and Annette, you should check your in-game mail, and Pete, I will get that chisel finished soon.

Decay

Wolfram — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 02:04:37 +0000

There is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about all the various ways that decay can be slowed or minimised, so here’s everything you need to know about it.

Buildings and fences:

Materials used: Buildings made from stone decay slower than buildings made from wood. Wood types have no effect on decay.
Deeds: Buildings on deeds with less than 28 days of upkeep benefit from slower decay. Buildings with more than 28 days have no decay at all.
Kingdom areas: Buildings built where there are no kingdom influences suffer from a penalty to decay.
Quality: The quality of the walls effects how fast buildings decay.

Items:

Materials used:
Metal: Items made from metal decay the slowest.
Stone: Items made from stone decay slower than wood and faster than metal.
Wood: Items made from cedar wood decay slower than other wood types. Items made from Oak take less damage when used.

Location:

Buildings: Leaving items inside a building will slow decay.
Mines: Mines get the same bonuses as buildings where decay is concerned, but a cave in will completely destroy an item.
Containers: Leaving items inside containers will slow decay. The material used to create the container has no effect on the items inside. Multiple containers do not stack.
inventories: With the exception of food and lit light sources, items in inventories take no damage at all.
Bank: Items in banks take no damage at all.
Deeds: There is no bonus or penalty for item decay rates from deeds. Deeds only affect fences and buildings.

Other:

Time: Items left untouched for some unknown and probably random time start to decay. In theory if you pick up and drop an item every day, it should not begin decaying.
Quality: the higher the quality of an item is, the slower it decays. Note that decay lowers the effective QL of an item, so the decay will accelerate as the DMG accumulates.

Notes:

Decay is the DMG that items take over time when they are left unused.

Damage is the DMG that an item takes when it is being used.

Items made from multiple materials get their decay from whatever material the finished item is considered. A longsword for example is made from metal, and the fact that the handle is made from wood has no effect on the decay or damage of the item.

Multiple containers do not stack. So, having an item in a backpack that is in a chest does not give it a bonus from both containers, it can only get a bonus once.

In theory, an item in a container that is in a house should get 2 bonuses to decay since the bonuses are different, but this has never been confirmed. However, at the very least, the container gets the building bonus, so it’s not a total loss if building and container bonuses do not stack.

Whilst the above tells how decay is supposed to function, it is extremely difficult to tell whether everything is working as intended since the algorithms for decay include a fair amount of randomness.

Here is the link to the server release notes where wood types began affecting decay:

http://wurmonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Wurm_Server_Release_Notes_2005#050419

Staying Alive

Wolfram — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 11:57:53 +0000

I’ve always thought that cloth armour was one of the most underrated pieces of equipment in the game, so I thought I would make a post about it. Maybe I can turn this into a series of some sort with some more play tips. If I can think of anything else that I think is worth talking about.

Ok, so the first negative of cloth armour are that it does not offer as much protection as say studded leather or chainmail armour. The second is that it wears out and takes damage faster than cloth armour. For these reasons, most players prefer studded or chain, which is fair enough, if your about to tangle with a monster that may prove to be above your ability, then you want every advantage you can get. I’m not disputing this, & I’m not suggesting that cotton should replace either of these fine armours, however, Cloth has one decided advantage over cotton, speed. Not speed of attacks, unfortunately, but speed of movement, so there are 2 main groups of people who should reconsider cotton armour.

The first group are those players who have no interest in this games form of combat & find themselves running whenever they encounter something tougher than a rat. The second are those who get sick of the reduced movement rates of heavier armours & tend to wander around the game bare as the day they were born.

If your a runner, then your only interest is getting out of range of the beastie before it causes too much damage & you can’t run anymore. What I suggest is that you get yourself a set of cloth armour. You only lose about 2kmh on cobblestones which seems pretty painful at first, but you get used to it to the point that after a while it just seems normal.

If your a streaker, then you probably only put your armour on before you fight something tough, if so, then your out of luck, sorry. You’d quickly get sick of taking off one suit to put on another. If you only put your armour on when your leaving home to go hunting or to visit another town etc, Then you’ve probably already had the experience where you just popped out to grab another felled tree & got jumped by something & never made it back to safety. Afterwards you probably promised yourself that you would never leave safety without your armour again, but have probably already done so. If you get some cloth armour & just wear it all the time around home, you wont really notice any speed difference after a while. Then the next time you get ambushed by something when you pop out to grab some more clay, you stand a much better chance of survival.

Unfortunately, I can’t practice what I preach since I’m lucky enough to own a set of drake armour which already has the best of both worlds. The speed of cloth & the protection of chain. I have however opened commenting on this post so that people can offer their own opinions, or hopefully post the results of using cloth armour, if they can find someone to make them some that is.

Last time I made a post, I mentioned one of this game’s easter eggs, so I thought I would point you towards the other one this time. There’s something you can do as an action with some eggs in your inventory, but don’t do it if eggs are precious to you since the egg will get used in the process.

Happy Wurming.

Me? A Blogger? Why would anyone care what I have to say?

Wolfram — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 10:39:12 +0000

I dunno why, but I was encouraged to add a few posts to this new team blog. So here’s the first, I hope your ready for bed, because that’s where you’ll end up if you continue reading.

Had a bit of a debacle with the forum this week. I had to open my big mouth & mention that it’s probably possible to get an RSS feed of Rolf’s forum posts so that you can keep up with things like news about the new server. Turned out that such a thing was not possible, so I did some research over on the SMF forum & eventually found a solution that seemed to work, implemented it & the server crashed 12 hours later, so we had to turn it off again. We also got reports that it was perhaps sending updates from restricted forums to the general public, despite this supposedly being impossible. Those 2 problems made us throw in the towel over the issue. Also, I owe Gurubear 5s for losing a related bet.

It’s not all bad news though, you can still do it from within the forum itself.

If you go to his forum profile, located here:

Rolf

you can click on a link near the bottom that says “Show the last posts of this person.” to get a list of all his posts (that you have access to).

On a different topic, I’m jealous of those players who are lucky enough to live in Sweden (& maybe neighbouring countries too) since some players are organising a meet up & Rolf has said that he can probably attend too. Have a good time guys & girls, have a beer for me.

Wurmian Meeting in Sweden

Here’s a hint for a wurm easter egg, make a spoon.
Happy Wurming,

Uze