Because I know that you all so enjoy hearing about my intermittant sagas of technological woe, I shall endeavor to regale you with yet another tale in the epic Pensive Kitten Is For Serious Tired Of 2009 Because Jesus Oh My God Holy Shit saga.
It’s Beck. Covering one of the greatest Velvet Underground songs of all time. For the win.
Because I was giving some Oblivion advice to Conner over at Samson’s, and realized I didn’t really have a useful and easy to follow Oblivion install guide, which may be of use to some people, including me because I’m dumb and forget things.
I’ll talk about general setup stuff first, then I’ll reprise my load order listing from here in some detail.
More after the jump:
With a nod towards this blog, which has nothing whatsoever to do with anything but has the coolest title ever.
A couple of interface quirks I’d like to talk about for a bit here. Two of them are quite brief:
1. Dear GIMP people. I would enjoy using your program more if it included such basic features as line tools and basic shape drawing. Please also note that if you have to resort to the level of elitist sarcasm shown in this tutorial (official, no less), you have failed. On that same note, I would enjoy using your program more if your user interface didn’t suck the good suck, but let’s stick with things that are changable, here.
2. I had the misfortune earlier tonight to need to check something in Blender. For those of you who haven’t had that same misfortune, let me advance to you the idea that what you should do, right now, before you keep reading, is fall to your knees and thank God that you’ve never had anything to do with this train wreck of a program. It’s every bit of that bad. 3D modeling program UI has always been on what is politely termed the “special” side, but Blender takes this to previously unseen levels, so that the prerequisite for even the most simple tasks involves some bronze knife waving, and probably some ritual goat sacrifices and smearing yourself with its blood to perform the arcane rituals necessary to, say, open a menu.
In my case, I needed to see how a texture mapped to a model, and then export the map to an image file. This is something Blender is able to do, except when you have the default options checked. It turns out that if you have the option checked to insert the name of the object into the filename for the image file, what you get isn’t a tga file like it ought to give you. What you actually get is some kind of empty non-file, which doesn’t contain anything whatsoever, let alone the information you want.
Spent about an hour on that one. It was somewhat less fun than you may think.
Shifting gears somewhat, I haven’t talked about this much on the blog, but it turns out that Civ 4 is actually pretty editable, assuming you don’t mind digging through XML, don’t mind some trial and error, and are ok with doing some simple dds editing. Since I’m that guy, no problem. It’s not what I’d call a particularly polished editing platform, but it does tend to work more often than not.
One thing, however, has me facepalming. You may remember, in days of yore, previous Civ games having culture-specific music. Nice, immersive, etc, etc. In Civ 4, OTOH, they set it up by era, with one soundtrack for every culture depending on era. Which isn’t so bad in the first two eras, because they evenly split up the music between cultures. It’s not perfect, but it kind of works. And…then they got lazy. Middle ages? It’s all Christian chants. 20 tracks worth. Renaissance? 16 tracks of Bach backed up some Mozart and a couple other guys. Industrial? Bach, Brahms, and Dvorak. I like strings as much as the next guy, but not when I’m trying to play as China, or Mali, or the Aztecs, or, you know, most of the civs in the game. Modern era’s a bit better, but not by much.
Which would be ok if you could mod it, and since they added civ-specific unit art in Beyond the Sword, you’d think you could, only not. Civ-specific diplo music? Sure. Messing with the soundtrack? Not so much. OTOH, they went to the trouble of importing a bunch of Civ 3 music and whatnot, only to…not use it at all.
WTF, Firaxis? WTF?
Because I didn’t actually get around to doing this prior to the blog update, so let us discuss for a moment that latest in the many Wheel of Time novels, the Gathering Storm, taking our cues from the Tor.com reviews by the esteemable Leigh Butler, in both spoiler and non-spoiler versions.
Here’s my basic point about the thing: Having recieved it from Amazon thanks to the labors of my most excellent girlfriend, who indulges my addictions despite not quite getting it, I sat down, read avidly for a couple of hours, reluctantly played D&D until 2 am, then sat down and finished it at 7:30am, ignoring several suggestions by my body that perhaps we could do some of this tomorrow, perhaps, after resting. Having finished, I said things approximating “OMG OMG OMG YOU GUYS THAT WAS THE AWESOMEST THING THAT EVER AWESOMELY AWESOMED IN THE AWESOME HISTORY OF AWESOME DUDE WTF OMG ROCK ON” and spent the next hour reading the comment thread about it before collapsing into a coma around 8:30 in the morning.
“But you do that each and every time you get a new WoT book,” I hear you say. “What I really want to know is, I stopped at like, Book 6. Should I gather my enthusiasm and read Book Freaking 12?”
The short answer is “Hell yes.”
The slightly longer but still spoiler-free answer is, hell yes. I’ve been reading this series since 1994, and this book finally brings closure to a bunch of plotlines, has random epic moments that would have closed earlier books, and serves us up excellent character moments, and does so in such a way that not only matches what I’ve been wanting for 15 years, it exceeds what I’ve been wanting for 15 years and leaves me deeply happy and satisfied. The series is now coming to a close, it’s happening soon, and it’s going to be good.
And now for some moderate spoilers after the jump:
My dearest America, it’s time we had a chat. I know that it’s been some time since we’ve talked, but you should know that I’ve been hard at work, doing my part to rebuild our great nation. And I thought I’d let you know, sweet America, about some new opportunities for you to do your part to restore our beautiful country to what it once was.
[/President John Henry Eden]
Fallout. DLC. All you need to know.
[/Three Dog]
Because I enjoy some of the characters in Fallout, as you may have noticed. What’s that? You noticed? Well, I try. I do try.
Anyway, so I picked up the Fallout Game of the Year Edition, which coincidentally has all five of the DLCs for the game. So I thought I might do that whole review thing, and then sum up the series at the end.
DLC1 Operation: Anchorage:
In which you fairly randomly enter a virtual reality simulation to go fight the oft-referred to battle for Anchorage during the Chinese invasion. There’s some good backstory entertainment here, and while if I really wanted to go play an FPS full time I’d go play Call of Duty 4, Operation: Anchorage was still pretty fun. I enjoyed the novelty of the weapon, ammo, and health pickups, and if it was all maybe a bit too easy at level 5, I enjoyed all the missions, dug the change of scenery, and had a (literal) blast.
If I have one minor complaint, it’s that the rewards are wildly misproportionate to what you actually end up doing, so that at level 5 I wound up walking out of the bunker with the best power armor in the game, a crate full of uberweapons, and 3 or 4 loads full of random power armor and other weaponry, which basically set me up for the whole rest of the game.
But, since fun > munchkinness, I think O:A is a good 4 out of 5 aliens.
DLC2 The Pitt:
In a word, this DLC was great. The industrial wastelands of the Pitt were fun to roam around in, the new items were good and not too ridiculous in any direction, and I enjoyed the quests, and I enjoyed them enough to actually find and pick up all 100 steel ingots in the Steelyard.
My only complaint is that there just plain wasn’t enough of it. The main quest was almost ludicrously short, and there wasn’t a lot of side quest variety to go around. I got to the end of the quest and was like “That’s IT? That’s all there is?” I could have done with at least a couple more side quests, and it would have been nice if anybody actually said anything after the end of the main quest.
Still I had fun, and the Steelyard was an awesome dungeon, so The Pitt is a good 3.5 out of 5 aliens.
DLC3 Broken Steel:
Basically a continuation of the main plot and a raising of the level cap to 30, both of which are good things. The side quests are mostly throwaways (especially at level 20+), but they’re still good. The main quest, such as it is, is more or less how the original game should have ended in the first place, except the Broken Steel quests suffer in not having an actual Enclave face to them.
Still, I got to kill a lot (a whole lot) of Enclave troopers, and the dungeons were mostly pretty good. I particularly enjoyed the search for the Tesla Coil and the whole subway section.
Quibbles aside, I had fun. 3.5 of 5 aliens.
DLC4 Point Lookout:
This is by far the least exciting of the DLCs, and suffered from an almost complete lack of interesting quests to go with all of the new locations to explore. It also suffered from the fact that I did the whole thing at level 23 and was easily more powerful than any given enemy in the whole place. Had I known, I would have shown up at level 5 or 8 or so.
To elaborate a bit, there are, I dunno, 5 or 6 side quests scattered throughout an area that may as well be the wastelands except there’s a swamp and all the enemies are either rednecks or refugees from the 60s. They apparently spent all their budget on land creation, and about 5 minutes on dialogue – there are something like 4 or 5 speaking NPCs in the whole thing, for very generous values of speaking. Most of the loot is good for a laugh, but kind of lame. The actual quests varied from yawn fests I did out of a sense of completism to some pretty excellent moments – the “main quest” such as it was was pretty entertaining, as was the spy quest.
I really expected a bit more out of the place, however. 2.5 of 5 aliens.
DLC5 Mothership Zeta:
Leaving aside the fact that you basically know how this is going to play out, Mothership Zeta was awesome, easily the best of the DLCs and as far as I’m concerned almost entirely without flaw. As a dungeon, it was awesome. Neat locations, the alien tech was neat, you get to see Earth from space, and the alien logs varied between hilarious and disturbing. Some fun NPCs, ranging from US Army medics to a samurai who babbles at you in Japanese. I enjoyed practically every second of the thing, came away with some great loot, and had a lot of fun.
That said, you would be wise to make a lot of saves while playing, as there some fairly serious bugs. I relied on autosaves, and almost lost 6 or 8 hours of playing time when one of the quests broke. Not enough to kill my enjoyment, though it gave me a bit of worry.
All in all, 4.5 aliens, knocked down slightly because of the bugs. You should really check this one out.
Fallout DLC Series:
Now, how do these stack up against, say, the Oblivion DLCs, which were mostly lackluster? Very well, I’d say, and even the least of the Fallout branch (Point Lookout) was at least equal to some of the best of the Oblivion stuff, say Mehrunes Razor. Knights of the Nine is probably still better than any individual DLC here, but not by a whole lot.
Overall, I’m guessing Bethesda learned their lesson from the disaster of the Oblivion DLCs – each of the Fallout DLCs has actual questlines, new and interesting stuff, and if they’re all a little too light on the NPCs and dialogue, it’s still pretty good for the most part. All in all, these continue the Fallout trend – stronger writing than Oblivion, way better dungeons, and some interesting challenges.
I’d have liked an xpack as well, but these DLCs were the next best thing. If you enjoyed Fallout 3, you should probably pick them up. In particular be sure to not miss Mothership Zeta.
Well, I promised you all that eventually, one day, there would be a revamp of the blog using Wordpress as opposed to Movable Type, and one that would fix the comments, fix some nav issues, fix some backend issues, provide real plugin support, unite the clans, walk the dog, and cook waffles all at the same time.
With the exception of the clan uniting, dog walking, and waffle cooking bits (there were no plugins for these, sadly), I’m happy to note that the day is here.
Here’s the parts that will matter to you:
1. New Commenting System
Comments work much differently than in days of yore. They’re now completely inline with the posts and have much more robust editing capabilities than in the past.
In addition, there is now a capcha. Unregistered commenters (more on that in a sec) will see this once, their comment will go into moderation, and once approved that should be the end of it. Registered users will see one once upon registration and then will cease to be bothered.
You’ll notice two new comment-related things on the sidebar. One is a list of the last five comments. The other, under “Navigatory”, is a user control panel. Sort of like Samson’s blog, you can now register yourself as a commenter, upload an avatar, and a few other little things. If you perchance have a gravatar, WP will automagically pick up on it without your intervention.
Avatars can be 64×64 images of the usual types. If you’re above that, they’ll automatically resize, but I’d ask that you not upload any huge images, as it will make me very sad.
2. Search
Blog searches are somewhat changed. There’s now term highlighting in the search, as well as the ability to search by phrase by using quotes (the quick brown fox will search each word seperately, whereas “the quick brown fox” will search only that phrase) and a few other things I’m still unaware of.
Be aware that this search system will search parts of words, so searching for “the” will get posts with the, as well as then, them, themistocles, etc.
2. Navigation Improvements
The archives have now been moved back to the front page. Date-based stuff is in a collapsible tree, while the category stuff is in a long list to the side. I’m considering making this a dropdown – we’ll see.
The old seperate pages for Age of Kings, D&D, Battletech, Civ, etc have been removed. They were consistently low traffic areas of the site, some of them 10 years old and more, and intensive enough to update that it was scarcely worth the trouble. If there’s significant outcry about the removal I’ll consider putting them back, but otherwise not.
3. Things That Don’t Quite Work
There are still two minor bugs involving navigation. Firstly, the << Older Entries link at the bottom of the front page (and only the front page) doesn’t work. Still working on that. Secondly, while it’s possible to navigate individual pages and category pages from the left panel, can’t do it with date-based archives. WP just lacks the functionality, and I’m not good enough with PHP to figure it out.
Otherwise, I’m pretty happy. May be some more changes coming, maybe not, we’ll see. Try it out, see what works, what doesn’t, and let me know what you think or if anything breaks.