PHP, Zend Framework and Other Crazy Stuff
PC Gaming
Adventure In Eve
Mar 5th
I’ll write about anything of remote interest but since this really is at heart a technical blog about PHP I’ve decided not to dilute it any further. Thus for all those interested in following my progress in Eve Online and some other more general topics I nabbed a new domain and installed a second instance of Serendipity.
You can visit my Eve Online character, Maugrim McFiriba here: http://www.adventureineve.com
Again, I invite anyone reading here who has started or will start playing Eve Online in the future to look me up in-game and perhaps you can even hook into my Corporation, the Crimson Industries and Development (CIDEV) Corporation. We’re a fairly relaxed bunch who spend a few hours now and again knocking around in a motley collection of Cruisers, Industrials and Barges plying our mining skills and luck on the asteroid belts of quiet backwater systems. That’s when we’re not plying our other skills by sending Guristas and Sanshas to their frozen graves…
Eve-Online: Review of days 3 to 7 progress
Feb 22nd
To keep folk informed, I’ll be pushing Eve Online blog posts (and other topics) to a new blog separate from this one. Some quick polling showed people assume this is a near pure PHP medium so a new blog for the non-PHP topics is called for. This fits in with my target of 3 blog posts a week which now won’t be seen as spamming Planet PHP 
.
When I left off my last post I was enjoying ownership of a new Caldari Kestrel Frigate in Uitra, in the game called Eve Online, and had just joined a Corporation to further my experience and have a support network available. You can find me in-game as “Maugrim McFiriba”, the character I invented in the mid-90s with the now infamous “The Reaper” nickname, and later used as my internet handle all over Yahoo from 1998. Best of luck to other PHP developers trailblazing through Eve right now – I’ll add you guys as buddies in-game . Email me if you want in on my chosen Corporation in the next week or two.
This week started off quietly with me outfitting my new Caldari Kestrel. After training the required skills I’m now running with 4 Standard Missile Launchers (1 is held in reserve). To add a little to my “tanking” (the ability of a ship to absorb damage for extended periods without exploding) I’ve fitted a Shield Hardener, a Small Armor Repairer and a Shield Booster. The first is passive, the final two eat Capacitor power. My naming is not exact – still getting the hang of having module names memorised . I figured out recently that I was off the mark about increasing my ship’s capacitor max – I actually need to make modules I install require less by training relevant skills. In any case, I can now fit in those tanking modules and 3 Launchers without stressing my capacitor beyond it’s design limits. If I disable the Armor Repairer I can put an extra Launcher online (at a safe distance from the enemy since it drains my Capacitor dry when activating!) and increase my fire power by 33%. Assuming my shields can take the return beating with the Shield Booster enabled for short periods, and I don’t end up really really needing that Repair module, I can chew on level 1 Pirates from a distance of 20km or so and take out a ship with each grouped launch. I’m sure that won’t last long as the Pirates get wind of my new death dealer .
More after the jump. More >
My First Two Days Playing Eve Online
Feb 18th
It’s a lesser known trait of mine that I enjoy playing computer games, specifically strategy games for the PC. The only console I own is a Nintendo Wii – which is saying something since it’s the first console I’ve owned since the Sega Genesis! So this weekend, with all the free time I have, a new broadband connection courtesy of Eircom (after replacing the crappy Netopia router they give you for free; free as in scrap metal), and a little trepidation, I joined Eve Online.
Eve Online is a MMOG set in space. There are approximately 5000 star systems, 200,000+ subscribers, and perhaps 18,000 to 45,000 players online at any one time. Since I was playing at the weekend for extended periods, I noticed the numbers peaked on my GMT clock each evening. The idea behind Eve Online is to enter the vastness of space and make a name for yourself either through combat, mining, trading, production or research. These are not however true alternatives since any player can train any skill imaginable given enough time. So the name of success is called specialisation, not class leveling…
All star systems have a security rating from 1.0 to 0.0. I spent all my time in 1.0 and 0.9 star systems. The word is that going anywhere with a 0.8 rating or less is not something a Rookie should consider for at least a few weeks. Going to 0.5 or lower could charitably be called suicide. Check out YouTube for a few videos of what happens to players who get cocky and impatient and run off to a 0.4 system to mine. It only takes a high skill player with a few missiles…
As for strategic and tactical gameplay – Eve Online rocks. It’s a thinking man’s dream game. You need to select skills, compare weapons and ammunition types, review Market conditions for the best regional prices (some stations can charge double the average price for items), get used to how ships scale and how to assess which you can take on (which is pretty much nothing since 1.0 sec systems are heavily overwatched by the local race’s police forces and only suicides would attack you, or you them 
). Living in 1.0 space is quite safe and a more than a few corporations stay exclusively there. Even a few of the 0.0 Corporations maintain 1.0 sub-Corporations for you to join.
The game itself is beautifully rendered. Back in December CCP release the Trinity client was released which added an overall graphics update with high resolution textures. My PC was never taxed while running it. I have a pretty good gaming rig so I could easily run two clients at the same time (Eve also let’s you play three characters on your single account). Th only niggle was collision detection on large objects like stations and planets. While it seems an odd flaw, I suspect it’s a simple optimisation. The only annoyance it will serve is trying to reach anything on the opposite side of a station – my advice is to orbit around the station before making a straight-line approach to such objects.
My own experiences from a first weekend after the jump… More >
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl
Apr 5th
I finally got my copy of the game at the weekend, played a little, got the patch, found my save games were incompatible, restarted, and replayed (sigh) a little more. It’s an interesting game, full of interesting ideas and sometimes exasperating combat. Surprisingngly, given the level of buginess so evident (and definitely not addressed by that patch) it’s a good game overall. So it gets a thumbs up from me, with a sidenote that you should have a pretty decent rig to really get the most out of the game, and should have a certain tolerance for the inevitable bug or two.
Even so, there are some spectacular misses. Gameplay stands by itself very well, so these aren’t as important as they would be to a lesser First-Person Shooter, but still… The most obvious is that the settings menu for Video Options is a mess – Antialiasing and Anistrophy are non-existent. One is simply not working, the other is useless because STALKER’s game engine uses a weird rendering system that doesn’t support it. I’ve been reading the TweakGuide.com examination released earlier and all is not lost – there are tweaks you can make since the game is capable of being modded by extracting the content archives (much like Oblivion and Medieval 2). TweakGuide also comments on the effectiveness of some low-level options (which don’t seem to work better than the “medium” ones). Also HDR, important for GeForce 6 series GPU’s, is not a separate setting to be disabled.
Back to the game play – STALKER excels at a few graphical additions (even with the above). The most obvious is the weather. When it rains, it pours. When it let’s loose lightening, your video card takes notice. The second is the day/night cycle – and night is something to really take care with. Unlike Oblivion, or other half-assed attempts at day/night cycles, STALKER just takes the realistic of approach of making the sun set and rise at genuine times. Simple, effective. Half Life 2: Episode One (the level with the underground garage populated by Zombies) is a close match for how you’ll feel when night arrives. Even bumping up the gamma level doesn’t help with visibility. Even the flash light isn’t much help beyond a certain range. This really packs a cool punch – especially when you have to spend the next 7 hours of gametime (a lot less in real time of course ) stumbling around in the dark hearing the howls of a pack of mutant dogs and barely being able to see them when get close. Sychronising attacks with lightening strikes becomes a quickly learned skill .
The other cool thing is the “ALife”, watching mother nature at war with packs of Blind Dog mutants run into confrontations with those mutant boars around this corner, or something even weirder around another – all at random in a natural fashion. It’s cool to watch – especially once you realise those creatures have defining habits. At the start, I remember finding the body of a fellow Stalker surrounded by mutant dogs. After shooting up two, and scattering the rest I returned some hours later to find the escapees of my first attack had returned to the body and were apparently ravaging it – and their dead compatriots. I almost felt sorry for the poor sod whose pixelated body was being gnawed on, I was even tempted to use the “drag body” action to move him to a place safe from the local man-eating wildlife.
A few places where it goes wrong includes the mission system. Missions are obviously not finished in full – most are given by a handful of Traders, or Stalker leaders. Most come with no other in-game scenery, events, or NPC interaction other than the text descriptions. Oblivion was far better – of course Oblivion has voice overs for ALL the text which made it more immersive to start with. This lack of gloss in some areas, and the opposite in others is a sad thing – finished this game would have hit a few 90%+ marks in reviews, rather than the telling 80%+ it seems to be getting.
Overall, it’s flawed and buggy, but that’s easily forgiven once you jump into unique action. My score? I’d go with an 85% and hope it prods future FPS’s to new levels of originality.
Where Bethesda fail, the Modders prevail…
Mar 31st
After playing Oblivion and following the forums on how the game plays out I discovered (as did a lot of people) that the game comes with some serious flaws in later gameplay (level 15+). Now, being honest, this are not flaws per se in Bethesda’s perspective nor that of others – but being a long time Morrowind fan which I have played through a number of times, using different characters and joining different Guilds and Houses, it seems that way to me.
The problems are three fold:
1. Levelling seriously hurts unless you do some careful planning. It doesn’t bother me right now because my balanced Mage/Fighter class was designed to allow some choices in how I level attributes. But if you are not careful you can start skipping important attribute multiple-increases (up to 5x) by diluting your skills with common-use ones like Athletics, Security or Sneak.
2. Monsters and NPCs level with you – the infamous scaling system means a Level 5 character will meet Level 5 monsters, a Level 16 character will meet Level 16 monsters, etc. It’s not that clear cut of course, but imagine levelling to 16, having lower attributes for your combat/defence Major skills due to using non-character-specialisation Major skills, and having a lot of monsters running around with supposedly rare armour types… Not good IMO. Bethesda imposed a challenge, but left out a sense of achievement. At level 20, there is no achievement – everyone else is suddenly level 20 (or less) and often with the same great equipment you spent a fortune getting hold of. Again, Morrowind or main stay RPG fans will have issues with this.
3. Items are not rare. Need glass armour? Well, you and every other monster and NPC will be swimming in Glass armour once you hit a certain level. There are no statically placed, or rewarding rare weapons and armour to be found in dungeons and ruins. Instead MANY monsters will have “rare” items at later levels, right down to those scraggly looking Bandits who hijack you when travelling through the wilderness between towns. What’s the point of searching for those rare pieces of Glass armour when everyone has them? I don’t think there’ll be a challenging foray into any House treasuries in Oblivion looking those full sets of rare Ebony and Glass items…
.
I call these the Three Stinkers of Oblivion. It’s such a cool game, but someone along the line dumbed down the RPG element and jumped on the hack’n'slash bandwagon. Now, this is a personal perspective. When I level I want to see some creatures that were horridly difficult to defeat now cowering in fear at my passing (or at least speared up against the nearest tree by either my sword). I don’t want to find that challenging dungeon now even more challenging JUST BECAUSE I LEVELED!. AT least make it a little less obvious, and allow me a sense of power – until the next big bad Daedra cuts me into ribbons…
There are smaller annoyances. The Interface is clunky – sometimes I hate consoles for how they make developers forget about using mouses and keyboards. The maps contain zero detail defining elevation or terrain type. The maps are way too small. That horrible target reticle is way too big.
Other than the above I love Oblivion by the way. 
It’s a great game – but its the later levels of your character that seem to go pear shaped.
Now to the Modders part. Since Bethesda changed things like the above, some Modders have quickly gotten around to changing them to something else more in keeping with the RPG spirit of things. I’m just going to list four Mods I’m currently using at the moment (the rest are small things that add convenience and hardly worth mentioning). The second is an absolute must have to fix the clunky UI in some limited way.
This Mod imposes a new Levelling system which offers real time calculation of Attributes. If you needed before now to concentrate efforts to obtain 5x Attribute multipliers on level up, then stick this in and worry no more. In fact you can quit worrying about leveling at all – there are now no leveling screens to click through. It also slows down levelling rates a little bit (not much – other mods can slow it down far more by directly changing skill increase rates and such). Comes in two varieties – Level according to Skill increases within your Major Skillset, or Specialised Skillset.
This is a big improvement. It’s a UI mod which imposes a smaller Font on text in the Inventory, Skills, Magic, etc interfaces. It’s such a huge difference to be able to view three times the number of items on a single screen with this done. It also increases the map size (it’s stupidly small by default). Also contains optional Mod files to remove the display of certain subsets of Compass markers. For those with a real need for orienteering across Cyrodil.
Iyachtu’s Monster/NPC Scaling:
Simply put – it imposes a number of Level caps on NPC’s, Monsters, etc. The idea is that the more you progress in the game, the more challenging the monsters will become, but the less likely ALL monsters will match your Level. It’s pretty specific in what it does, and most caps will not emerge until a level of above 15-20. Some caps are static – meaning advanced NPC’s will actually be powerful, not Level 1 wimps you can rub out at level 1. It may sound doubtful, but it certainly sounds better than being able to finish main quests at Level 1 by becoming a weird Breton with severe insomnia…Tom Servo’s Rare Items:
Items are the last problem – why should Ebony and Glass items be so hugely common at all? Where’s the fun in locating that full set of Glass Armour and Weaponry and stealing it? Where’s Morrowinds classic habit of hiding items in hard to reach, or even find, places? The Rare Items mod removes such items from common Monsters and NPC’s and leaves them (as a rarity) on higher class monsters such as the Minotaurs, Dremora Lords, etc. Since they are rare, monsters and NPC’s will be less likely to have them available – so it also ensures that as you level reaching for that Difficulty slider is not necessary, and there is some sense of achievement when you finally get a full set of rare items.
Auryn’s mod requires you to create a new Character (there’s are alternative player levelling mods but I like this one’s sense of balance and skill/attribute capping). The rest are simple drop ins.
