I had purchased Frozen Synapse off of Steam quite some time ago during the Summer Camp Sale. Sadly, I still haven't "had a chance" to play it for more than 5 minutes because I have been very busy. Very busy playing Minecraft that is. Alas, we are back on the Minecraft server and working on our next project after a 2 to 3 month period of inactivity. The castle by the way, is being built at the expense of nearly every single game that I regularly play. Though, to be honest, there's not a whole lot out now in terms of AAA titles that I am interested in playing anyway.

The castle is being built completely legit; No console spawning save for a couple of items that I felt were unjustly lost due to server glitches, lag and what not. Seeing as how no large flat areas exist within reasonable distance of the primary server spawn point, we have to demolish entire hillsides in order to make room for any large-scale building project (by we I mean my lovely play partner <3). A separate project, making use of the massive amount of dirt that was unearthed is in progress.

The structure itself is just about done, we just need to work on applying some decorative flair and finish the interior design. As far as functional things, we have two farming modules: 1 with an automated wheat farm system and another with an in-progress farm for sugar cane, flowers and whatever else. We really need a cobblestone generator as well as a tree farm for the sake of not having to strip down even more of the trees from the surrounding area. Also, a minecart station is probably needed at some point.

After months of not being able to find one, there just happens to be three mob spawners within a very close distance of the castle (kind of cheated and loaded the server map into MCEdit): A spider spawner, a skeleton spawner and a zombie spawner (which was accidentally destroyed by a rogue creeper). The skeleton and spider spawners have both been setup with item grinders. It's nice having a near infinite arrow supply. Oh and, spider farming isn't the most efficient way of obtaining wool by the way. Though I suppose it is if you just go AFK and leave Minecraft running in the background.

A visual tour of what we have so far is included in the full article. I'll upload a FRAPS video later.

To be honest, I am not sure that I notice that much of a difference between DirectX 9 and DirectX 11. TotalHalibut though, posted a pretty good comparison video on his YouTube channel. Nonetheless, it is still a fantastic looking game. I am playing at 1080p with everything set to Extreme except for shadows and water, which are set to Ultra. My machine doesn't quite have the stones to run Crysis 2 at Ultra at 1080p with FRAPS recording full-screen without serious performance issues. That's just the way the world should be I suppose. Oh, sorry about the crapass frantic running about in the video.

For whatever reason, FRAPS has an audio sync issue on some machines, mine included unfortunately; I'm not sure if it is the FRAPS software itself or some compatibility/driver issue. According to the FRAPS support forums, folks with ASUS motherboards have resolved this issue by uninstalling the EPU-Engine and Turbo-V (mostly EPU-Engine). I have also heard that setting both your recording and playback audio sample rates to 44.1 kHz helps as well. Neither solutions nor anything that was suggested seemed to work for me including, changing the HDDs to which I record the videos and changing the video/recording resolutions/FPS.

So, I don't know how to prevent the delay from occurring in the first place, but it's pretty easy to fix. I think the audio track may be recording at a slightly slower rate than the video. As the video progresses, the audio becomes increasingly out of sync. In fact, the audio tracks on some FRAPS source files are longer than the video. All you need to do is compress it down (not clip, compress). There is a YouTube video that shows how to do the corrections in Sony Vegas, it's pretty easy to do the same thing in Adobe Premiere:

1. Right click on audio track on your Timeline sequence and select "Unlink"
2. Select the Rate Stretch Tool (hotkey: X)
3. Drag the audio track to compress it down.

It's a little tedious to align the audio with the video if the lengths are the same, but it works reasonably well. I tried setting a manual delay within each of the FRAPS video chunks in both YAAI and VirtualDub, but that didn't seem to work. I'm pretty sure that was my fault though.

I fell victim to the office plague this past week and ended up spending a beautiful weekend indoors; So, this post as well as half of my Netflix queue was the result. I kind of wanted to do a series of posts on both world building as well a case study of several of the games cited in this entry as well as several others: Return to Krondor, Baldur's Gate II and a couple of others are also single city games widely regarded as pretty decent. But I don't think I have the time or interest to play through some of those games again, since it has been so long. Anyway, I think that city settings have been a fairly popular tabletop RPG setting; Either as a part of a larger campaign or some sort of one off story. But how well do they translate into video game narratives and what is needed in order to craft a good city?

Video games RPGs, unlike their pen and paper brethren obviously do not have the luxury of an imaginative game master to make up new and interesting things throughout the course of the campaign. The game engine must fulfill that roll; Often with many limitations. One of which is the challenge of creating diversity within a smaller environment. Typically, most large game cities only have about 4 or 5 "zones", perhaps up to 10 if you include surrounding areas and stuff like that. Fewer areas should in theory mean that more effort needs to be placed into making each area feel unique.

Sweet! I had missed this bit of news somehow.

Celebrating our success includes you, our customer.  In honor of our birthday we are increasing disk space on all plans by +25%.  This is available now to both new and existing Linodes.

I've been hosted on handful of services and so far, Linode is the only one that I have been almost 100% satisfied with in terms of both product delivered and support received. Though to be fair, I think my needs had outgrown a shared hosting environment when I had switched over. But still, no retarded billing issues, no outages other than one or two issues with the datacenter isn't too shabby. Keep up the excellent work! Also, I have more disk space on this account than I know what to do with at the moment. Suggestions?

Not really a review, but just a blurb on something that I have been playing on-and off lately. World of Tanks has been brought up in casual conversation every so often over the past couple of months or so, but I have always dismissed or forgotten about it. I finally had a chance to take a closer look at it while I was on vacation last month. So for those who don't already know what it is, World of Tanks is a fun free-to-play (freemium) PvP MMO about well, tanks.

You start with a small selection of WWII tanks (3 total: US, USSR and German). Choose one and fight in a team of 15 against another team of 15 tanks. If you die, you can exit the battle and start another match with another tank while the other match finishes. Each match yields a certain amount of experience and credits depending on how well you do. Experience points can be used to unlock different tank upgrades in which you use credits to buy. Each upgrade is specific to that particular tank. It's a bit grindy to say the least. The catch, at least from what I can tell is that the later upgrades take a fuckton of time to grind out, less-so if you purchase some of the premium content with real-life cash. But, it's something that I can easily pick up and set down with very little investment.

The UI and controls are fairly straightforward. There's not that much of a learning curve; I mean for the most part, you move around, shoot things and/or die. Dying seems to be something that you end up doing a lot early in the game. Graphically, it is fairly nice looking. I mean, it's not Crysis, but I was impressed with how polished and nice looking it was. For some reason, I was under the impression that WoT was some schlocky looking freebie game. I'm not sure if it's really my thing, but it's free and something that I can play with friends.

Oh, the starter tanks suck. The game is more fun once you get a tank that can actually aim and move more efficiently than a potato.