Anime Art Blog Cool Geek Life World Rant

May 31, 2003

Geek  Zombie Werespiders Are Go!

Dungeons and Dragons players, start your engines: Shadows of Undrentide, the first expansion pack for Neverwinter Nights, has gone gold. Development is underway on the second expansion, Hordes of the Underdark. No details can be found here.

I have to admit I was disappointed with NWN. The bundled campaign was, frankly, dumb. Compared with the brilliance of recent D&D titles (other than the execrable Pool of Radiance II), NWN was a drab little story of no great interest. Torment, by comparison, was simply amazing; both Baldur's Gate games had strong storylines; and both the Icewind Dale games, while targeted primarily at the hack-'n'-slash crowd, were full of delightful touches. NWN was just blah.

But that didn't worry me too much, since what I really wanted was the NWN tools (the Aurora Toolset) for designing my own adventures, and the NWN engine for playing them. Unfortunately, they have problems too. The toolset I can live with, since it's the end result that matters. The game engine, in and of itself, isn't too bad, though I will always prefer isometric perspective for this sort of game. (Until you get fluid realtime photorealistic rendering working, anyway, and that's some years off yet.)

The problem is the tiles. When you want to build an area, you are given a choice of tilesets: Forest, City, Sewers, and so on. Once you've made your choice, you're stuck with it: you can only use one tileset for a given area. This wouldn't be so bad if the tilesets had more variety in them. But when your players can open a door and say at once "Oh yes, a #4 castle room, the only searchable location is the desk drawer.", you have a problem.

You can't pick an empty room and fill it with furniture manually, either. You don't have empty rooms - they generally come prefurnished - and even when you do, you just don't have the furniture.

The forests look nice. The water effects are great. The falling leaves, the ambience of the sunlight through the treetops, are wonderfully rendered. So why didn't they take a little time to produce a stream that can bend at something other than a right-angle? A road that can run in a direction other than precisely North-to-South or exactly East-to-West?

As for the indoor settings: why is everything so darn big? I want some nice claustrophobic effects in my tombs. I want my players bumping into each other and tripping over sarcophagi when they're in a desparate battle against the advancing horde of kill-crazed zombie werespiders. What I definitely don't want is a room the size of baseball stadium. Any fool can tell you that zombies are hockey fans, and don't care for baseball at all.

I wish the designers had taken a look at The Sims. Its design tools are nothing amazing; houses in The Sims aren't likely to win any architectural awards. But in terms of flexibility it's miles ahead of what Neverwinter Nights offers.

And so I put NWN to bed about six months ago, and went back to playing Nethack.

Now the first expansion pack is about to hit the shelves, and my interest has resurfaced. Why is that?

Well, for one thing, I like Dungeons and Dragons. I like it lots. I've been playing D&D in its many incarnations for twenty years now, and in that time it has gathered a richness of material that no other game can match. As an example, I went shopping recently and bought seven new hardcover official D&D rule books. That's entirely ignoring the softcovers, the adventures, and the huge amount of semi-official and unofficial material.

For another thing, Bioware seem keen to do the right thing with NWN. Though the tileset model is flawed, they are open about the file formats involved, and the result is a suprising number of fan-created tilesets becoming available for download. Fan-created monsters too, and armour and statues and all sorts of things. They're known as Hakpacks, and here you can see a listing of what's been created just in the past week. Check out this example of an underwater setting. That seaweed looks a bit odd because it's just modified trees: this was originally the forest tileset. And here are some really amazing monsters: myconids (mushroom men), familiar to Icewind Dale fans.

Bioware recognise the value of fan content, and are working to make NWN automatically download hakpacks as needed. The problem is, you see, that if you want to play an adventure that needs a particularly hakpack, and you don't already have that hakpack, the whole thing goes splat in an unpleasant way.

Apart from the tileset problem, and the dire lack of furniture that you can place on your own problem, NWN is amazingly flexible. It includes a full programming language which can change anything in the game (apart from those pesky tiles, of course). Bioware are working to add a database to it. (Hint: Use Berkeley DB; it's free even for commercial use, and it works.)

Maybe I need to wait for Neverwinter Nights II to see a proper fix for the tileset problem, but in the meantime I think I'll buy Shadows of Undrentide, download myself a few hakpacks, and give Neverwinter Nights I another try.

Posted by Pixy Misa at 09:16 PM | Geek | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Cool  Squirrel Trouble?

This site has the answer. They can also solve your koala, wombat and penguin infestation worries.

On top of this, they explain why everything tastes like chicken, and how to properly cook a frog.

Posted by Pixy Misa at 12:07 PM | Cool | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

May 30, 2003

Cool  Squirrels Went Berserk

We may think we're safe living in Australia, but as recent news shows, there is no place truly safe from the evil wiles of the squirrel conspiracy! Little known fact: Dave Barry is no more than a front for the furry menace!

Handy tips on how to deal with the squirrel threat are available here and also here.

And you thought lemurs were bad...

(via The Squirrel Conspiracy)

Posted by Pixy Misa at 08:37 PM | Cool | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

May 29, 2003

Art  Little, Big

Tuesday, the day that will go down in history as having been eaten by mice, I went out and bought another two DVDs. After all, I only have 41 already in my to-watch pile.

These two are special. These two came recommended. First up, Big Trouble, the film of the book Big Trouble by Dave "I am not making this up" Barry, as recommended by reader Susie. (Yes! We have readers!)

Second, Big Trouble in Little China, as recommended on the Bad Astronomer's Good Movie page. Reviews will follow, as sure as droppings follow day-eating mice.

Logically, they'd go on the shelf next to Ranma ½: Chûgoku Nekonron daikessen! Okite yaburi no gekitô hen, but I like to keep my anime separate from other stuff. In case of cross-pollination or something. I don't know.

Posted by Pixy Misa at 03:06 AM | Art | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

May 28, 2003

Blog  Blogger is Scroggled

Blogger won't talk to me. Well, that's fine. I won't talk to Blogger either.

Meanwhile, coolness is where you find it:

As perhaps the clearest evidence yet of the power of sophisticated but inexpensive game consoles, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has assembled a supercomputer from an army of Sony PlayStation 2 devices.
I know that's why I bought mine.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the project, which uses the open-source Linux operating system, is that the only hardware engineering involved was placing 70 of the individual game machines in a rack and plugging them together with a high-speed Hewlett-Packard network switch. The center's scientists bought 100 machines but are holding 30 in reserve, possibly for high-resolution display application.
Or possibly because they still haven't finished Final Fantasy X.

Posted by Pixy Misa at 02:24 AM | Blog | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

May 26, 2003

Blog  Bunyip Blogging

Blog of the Day is Professor Bunyip:

Anyone who works on the theory that you get what you pay for can't be too surprised by Blogger's recent problems. They've driven Tim Blair to a new home and tempted the Professor to follow suit. Unfortunately, despite donning a pair of elephantine trousers, borrowing a back-the-front baseball cap from young Master Bunyip, and addressing his computer his "dude", all that slash-dot-font-template stuff at Moveable Type was incomprensible when the Professor logged on early in the evening. It was even moreso after a bottle of red, several ports, an Irish coffee, a few more ports and, ill-advisedly, a long telephone conversation with Mrs. Bunyip's youngest brother, the clan's purported expert in matters cyber. The only wisdom gleaned from that exchange: An intoxicated academic should not expect sound counsel from a red-eyed young fellow whose explanations are punctuated by the background bubbling of a bong.
Stylesheets! Bloody stylesheets! Even if you get them right they don't work!

Posted by Pixy Misa at 11:54 PM | Blog | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Cool  Seriously Wild Life

Horned Kangaroos? Who ordered the horned kangaroos? Come on, I don't have all day. Right. Giant marsupial lions? Who ordered giant marsupial lions?

The lion-like predator, which could stand nearly a metre and weighed about 250 kilograms, had a pair of retractable thumb-like claws to disembowel or drag prey up trees. But a reconstruction of one of its feet has revealed for the first time that all of the lion's digits were retractable, not just the thumbs.
That's so cool. You got opposable thumbs, monkey boy? Well, so do I, only I can disembowel you with mine!
Dr Long said the prize of the Nullarbor fossil specimens included a horned kangaroo: "It is an adult specimen with a very peculiar bulbous nose."
Yeah?! Well, same to you buddy!

Posted by Pixy Misa at 11:21 PM | Cool | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Blog  Oh Boobies, Wherefore Art Thou?

America is on holiday and half my favourite bloggers are AWOL. Blogging being the incestuous business that it is, this means I don't get to steal report any new news from other blogs.

Meanwhile, Fark is having a boobies moratorium. Really, why bother running the site if you're not going to have boobies?

Posted by Pixy Misa at 11:16 PM | Blog | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

May 25, 2003

Anime  Good News, Bad News, Good News

Good news is that Azumanga Daioh has been licensed by AD Vision. Looks like it will be a while before it hits the shelves, though; ADV are notorious for sitting on licenses, sometimes for years. ADV are also releasing Full Metal Panic, a fact that I had somehow missed. Have to get my pusher to add it to my standing order.

Bad news is that AnimeSuki have had their server pulled for being the victim of multiple DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks.

Good news is that they'll soon be back on a better server with a different hosting company.

Unsurprising news is that Blogger ate my post. Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Post&Publish. Get it stuck into your head.

Posted by Pixy Misa at 11:02 PM | Anime | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Blog  I Taut I Taw A Leprechaun!

Blog of the Day is Eject! Eject! Eject!:

When I was nine I saw a leprechaun.

I’m not kidding. I was in the back seat of our car driving up the hill from the hotel my dad managed, back in Bermuda. I’d ridden up that hill, in that seat, hundreds of times. I knew every rock and clump of grass by heart.

Anyway, there he sat, up against a familiar rock: little green pants, little green vest, little green top hat, small little bone-white pipe. Captain Ahab beard – white, no moustache. I screamed like we had just run over Lassie.

Bill's an essayist rather than a day-to-day blogger, so he doesn't update his site that often. When he does update, though, it's guaranteed to be good.

Posted by Pixy Misa at 10:41 PM | Blog | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Blogroll
Instapundit
Tim Blair
IMAO
The Bleat
USS Clueless
Little Green Footballs
International Squirrel Conspiracy
Blogs of the Day
Tiger: Raggin' & Rantin'
Collinization
Geographica
Rob's Still in Japan
Professor Bunyip
Eject! Eject! Eject!
Suburban Blight
Practical Penumbra
Friday Fishwrap
Time For Your Meds!
Gweilo Diaries
Flooded Lizard Kingdom
The Puppy Pile
Mean Mr. Mustard
Amateur Hour
Motley Cow
Category Archives
Anime and Cartoons
Art, Books, Films, Music
Blogs And Blogging
Cool Stuff
Geek Stuff
My Life, Such As It Is
The World
Rants
Cute Kitties
Sitemeter