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Daggerdale – check

rolfjan — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 14:16:00 +0000

Allright I’m back in the saddle for the autumn glory. I’ll discuss that later, as I have 20 or so bugs lined up which will take a few days.

I successfully upgraded my Eclipse java development environment from the Helios version to Indigo today which feels very nice.

Yesterday evening I completed a game called Daggerdale which is based on Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition. It recently received a rating of 30/100 in the Swedish PC Gamer. Basically they thought it was unplayable with bugs, jerky fighting and pathetic conversations.

I actually enjoyed it pretty much after a while and thought the fighting worked comparably good. I couldn’t bear playing Dragon Age Origins because I involuntarily switched characters mid fight. In Daggerdale I never lost control and enjoyed assaulting the groups of monsters with blinding or fear arrows.

That said, I can’t really recommend it to anyone but die hard D&D fans unless it’s really cheaply priced. I enjoy seeing the D&D game mechanics in play even if things like the xp ladder are bastardized because of the amount of kills you get. The plot is thin but works pretty well in the end and the boss fight is somewhat interesting.

In case you for some reason decide to try it out and manage to complete it, note that you can keep playing after the credits. I didn’t stay up long enough to see if the game continues somehow but at least you can keep grinding monsters and gain levels. Not that I will but I like that it just didn’t end.

Too much weather

rolfjan — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 13:43:49 +0000

Actually we have something of a snowstorm here today but for me it was another kind of storm. Initially I had unexpectedly little trouble upgrading linux from Lenny to Squeeze. Some locale issue only. But then bad things started happening.

Mysql failed to upgrade and couldn’t be removed and reinstalled.

Finally i found the culprit in a web forum – you can’t keep the ancient flag skip-bdb in my.cnf any longer. Just remove the line.

Anyways, that took an hour or two.

Then it was time to copy the tomcat configuration. Tomcat has been upgraded to tomcat6 from tomcat5. It still looks very much the same but it just doesn’t work any longer.

Tomcat is free but you have to be a professor to use it. I will start calling it Stopcat now. I don’t have a lot of love left for it.

Egal will look at it during the weekend. Hopefully that’ll sort things out so we can move on monday or tuesday instead.

Calm before the storm

rolfjan — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 07:41:42 +0000

Here I sit in the office on a sleety friday morning in february. I’ve decided to push on to move hosting today so in an hour or two I expect to bring the game server software down and start copying the data to the new datacenter.

Now, there’s still some things to do. Yesterday evening as I was about to install tomcat on a server I realized the linux distribution had changed from Lenny to Squeeze a few days ago. That’s quite a big step going from version and you don’t want to be one version behind really. So now I have to upgrade all servers to Squeeze first. I did one server yesterday and it went fine though so hopefully it’s just a formality.

Now a lot of things often go awry when you have these kinds of well-planned scenarios that should run smoothly. I’ve watched too many war movies I guess but hopefully there will be no show stopper surprises.

If everything goes totally wrong I’ll just revert the DNS changes and we run from the old servers during the weekend anyways.

Here we go!

Servers installed, now where’s the speed?

rolfjan — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 12:32:02 +0000

The servers are now installed in the server cabinet at Exeo. I think they look pretty impressive:

However!

It’s been a hassle with the SSD’s. The Corsair had orange light which means it wasn’t accepted and we can’t use it as it seems. The intel wasn’t discovered properly as a disk of its own and we could only add it as a hot swap to the other disks. Initially. Eventually I worked out how to create a logical disk from it so that it can be discovered by the operating system and virtual machine.

Now, for some reason it isn’t faster than the system disk which is normal 7200 sata disks. Which of course is a bit worrying but it’s only a matter of time until I figure out what I´ve done wrong. It’s possible that I have to move it from the RAID card and put it on the normal SATA connectors in the machine instead but there’s a lot of other options to look into first.

More trolling

rolfjan — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 16:05:10 +0000

The next package from Dell arrived today. It looked ominous:

This package should contain 6 hard disk trays

I hoped the logistics department at Dell had come to their senses by now. But it doesn’t look good…

More screw envelopes!

Okay. I have now received 50+ screws, each in an envelope of their own. This constitutes trolling.

The pinnacle of logistics or simple trolling?

Anyways. It worked. I finally received the trays themselves. Below is the result. Soon we can start testing which one is best!

Left: Intel X25-e SLC SSD, Right: Corsair F120 MLC SSD with T.R.I.M.

These SSD’s are both really fast in their own ways. The expected problem however, is that they are said to slow down with use. An SLC SSD like the one on the left has an architecture that prevents it somewhat but apparently you really need T.R.I.M, which the right one has.

The left one is 2.5 times as expensive as the right one though so hopefully it does something better. From what I understand you really want SLC with T.R.I.M but virtually no such disks exist. At least affordable ones.

I’m going to put them in the new machines asap and start Wurm game servers on them to see if they slow down noticably.

Here are some SSD benchmark results for “heavy workload”. There is one for gaming workload as well, not sure if it means more disk I/O.

Dell packaging

rolfjan — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 09:39:50 +0000

The extra hot swap disk trays I ordered for the 2.5″ SSD slots arrived from Dell yesterday. Or so I thought.

This is how the package looked:

I couldn’t figure out what the letters contained. When I examined the hard disk trays I was a bit dismayed. The salesman obviously misinterpret my request totally. This is something else:

It’s just the part that goes into the hard disk tray used to fix the 2.5″ disk in a 3.5″ tray.

Now, the letters actually were really interesting:

Every letter contained one screw in a plastic bag. Each of the 24 letters had air retention plastic bubbles inside.

It’s good that Dell takes their customers seriously but being so anxious about screws gives a nervous impression. And I guess I’d like if they made an effort to come up with a bit more environmental solutions. Like maybe putting 24 screws in one letter instead.

I LOVE the new tutorial!

rolfjan — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 22:49:18 +0000

I finished the new Wurm Online tutorial today with a new account and I to say the least I am amazed.

I am of course very biased but I usually loathe tutorials and want them to end as soon as possible. Not this time. The nice setting and the.. love and detail in the tutorial made me want more so I was actually a bit disappointed when it ended.

Wurm looked even better than I expected. When I entered the mine in the end it felt like I was entering some kind of dungeon in an amusement park. Very cosy.

You guys made a fantastic job and I am moved by what you have accomplished. Group hug!

For all you D&D fans

rolfjan — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 09:35:53 +0000

Once every autumn and spring me and some old friends gather in a remote place and continue our old ongoing campaign of Dungeons and Dragons. Which is what we did this weekend. We’ve recently upgraded to 4th edition and are pretty much excited about it.

We all agree that it’s a near perfect system now. I think they’ve managed to solve a lot of or all of the question marks with regards to things like lighting, vision, skill rolls and movement. The system is very quick and clear, with enormous amounts of interesting features that all come together like a swiss clockwork. In the end it provides a very good base for fantasy role playing. Our only grudge is that it wasn’t like this twenty years ago:P

Without computer aid it would be very time consuming though which didn’t use to be a problem. Nowadays I like to randomize an encounter and print the monster sheets so i can take notes. This makes it possible to create a very interesting adventure in detail in an hour or two even if you don’t know the monsters much. You can spend more time creating the mood and adventure itself.

Here are my suggestions on the tools you need to be able to play sporadically (apart from the basic books):

You need D&D Insider so you can use the Character builder and Adventure tools.
One thing that I expect will revolutionize our game play is the rptools gaming software. I have started looking into it and am really looking forward to start using it.
You should spend an hour looking at the rptools tutorials to learn the basics including vision, lightning and fog of war.
Get a 4th edition framework for rptools. A framework is a campaign with some predefined scripts that will help with all sorts of game specific things like initiative, damage, skills, feats, states. I selected Rumbles but there is an italian as well which looks good. You can paste player and creature stats from D&D insider straight into the framework.
Get the Mapping Objects torrent. It contains 2+ GB of graphics used in rptool including a lot of D&D token art.
Hook up two computers – one for the DM and one for the players.

That should do the trick. A lot less time spent with administration and rule fuss and a lot more creating. Enjoy!

Oh, and something to look forward to: http://www.playneverwinter.com/

Twitters and a prize

rolfjan — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 12:45:56 +0000

The game servers now use twitter to broadcast events!

There are two types of tweets generated: server and village tweets.

The idea behind server tweets is to broadcast ingame events to the world and by that making them more real. And of course to make it possible to follow politics and important events while not online.

The idea behind village tweets is to make it possible to check the status and events of your village so that you can relax or react. You may want to keep this information private to village members.

Here is information on how to set up twitter for your village: http://wurmonline.com/forum/index.php?topic=42268.0

On an unrelated note: Did you notice that Blvd Media who pays ingame coins for visiting their web pages are running a campaign where you can win an iPod Nano?

Kevin, my contact at Blvd emailed me and said that he was worried because there were so few participants so he wanted me to promote it a bit. Which of course means that your chances are high to win it if you complete a survey.

Details on the campaign: http://wurmonline.com/forum/index.php?topic=41161.0

or just go to the shop http://shop.wurmonline.com/WurmWeb/index.jsp and fulfill some surveys in order to get a chance at winning.

Server twitter feeds:

https://twitter.com/wildserv1

http://twitter.com/freeserv1

https://twitter.com/goldenvalley1

http or https probably doesn’t matter.

An interesting project

rolfjan — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 15:49:40 +0000

After the recent tweaks aimed at making the game a bit more newbie-friendly including bug fixes with the new tutorial system, I was hoping to be able to select what to do today.

Yesterday the plan would be to start the project of coding Epic engine stuff but as the day went on I came up with another plan: to look into enabling player made kingdoms.

As it turns out, it may very well be possible. Today on the test server I’ve managed to create a declaration of independence item that brought up a form where I selected the name of my would-be kingdom of Marakas. I had to be mayor of a village that is to be the future capitol, and unless I was a high and mighty god there would need to be about 50 other players in the village or the perimeter standing still and not involved in fighting.

Since it would be too much coding to enable custom titles and offices at the moment, I selected to use the Mol Rehan template for those instead.

Once these requirements were met I pressed okay and after a few bug fix restarts I was finally the Chief of Marakas in my own new capitol!

Now I just have to go through all the server code and remove some hard coded Jenn Kellon and Mol Rehan stuff where applicable, even though these kingdoms will exist on all servers initially anyways. Also, there are some questions I need to sort out when it comes to changing servers but I’m on it so it looks good.