I haven’t posted in ages, life has been ordinary, not enough gaming, work blues etc etc.

Then I went to the Disco TOG LAN in Maryborough, and had a great time. Reminded me of the old AOB LANs we used to run in Canberra, except the Disco LAN goes for DAYS!

Apart from Steam being a complete pain in the arse for LAN gaming (offline mode + COD4 is a match made in hell), the gaming went very well indeed.. I played COD4, L4D, DOD Source, CS Source, TF2 with others at the LAN (there were 30 or so folk in attendance), and then alternated with Mount and Blade, Demigod and some other sp content when I needed a rest.

We all stayed in the motel which is part of the same venue, and were treated to very reasonably priced drinks and a plethora of hearty food. Best weekend in a long long time! Thanks to Disco, the Tog DODs crew and other Toggers who went, as well as the OLDR and OSOK players who also rocked up. Apart from Haahn’s shuttle box frying a beer on my desk the experience and setup were superb.

oh, and the single best thing about the LAN was this gorgeous contraption:

MAME running on the little box, and I played 20 levels of Rygar the Legendary Warrior.. truly a blissful experience. Managed to sneak some Shinobi and Golden Axe in too… also watched a Shock vs Woody duel on Gyrus, someone played Elevator Action in front of me, nearly made me cry with forgotten joy haha! Just to prove the setup works, see the next piccy.

Disco demonstrated his questionable sexual tendencies with some Ryu ninja skills in Street Fighter 4… I refused to take photos of that!

Here are some other photos:

Woody was afraid of being stung by my harsh wit…… and his aquarium box

The insides of the shuttle box that fried my beer into molten slag by venting towards my desk

Bodella was one of 2 water cooling nuts present at the LAN.. here he is drinking the effluent during pack up!

A happy snap of the DODs crowd.

One of the water cooled setups on display (just after being assembled and beginning a prior to a leak test I think), sexy despite the fact that I felt nervous just watching it in action.

Obligatory shot of the LAN in action, although about half the folk aren’t visible from this angle.

More comments and photos can be found at the TOG forums HERE

Feel free to post replies to this post in our forums HERE

Regards,

Scoobs

Having just installed WHS for the first time over the weekend I figured I would share some thoughts. Beware, technical content.

My main reason for using WHS was the stupidly large collection of external and internal hard drives of varying sizes which were getting hard to manage using XP in a drive-by-drive basis. I literally ran out of drive letters after mapping various drives from other PC’s on the network. WHS lets me consolidate them all in to a single pool of storage and makes adding and removing drives from that pool easy as pie. 

My secondary requirement (and this will make some readers cringe) was the ability to run the WHS server as a second utility PC, for iTunes, playing video, music, uTorrent MSN Messenger, burning CD/DVD’s and other tasks previously taken care of by the same hardware running XP. Yes, I know you’re _supposed_ to run WHS headless but I’m currently treating it like I did the XP install, complete with dual monitors and fancy wallpaper, take that!

After some initial apprehension about whether WHS could handle being used as a regular desktop install, the only real workaround I had to do during install/config was download the msi install for Live Messenger (8.5) because it didn’t want to install from the .exe. I haven’t managed to get the newest version of Live Messenger running yet but I’m working on it.

The bottom line for installing and running apps on the desktop is that anything which will run on Windows Sever 2003 will run on WHS, this also applies to drivers for your hardware. I didn’t have a problem getting all the drivers running on a five year old socket 754 motherboard (Asus K8V SE Deluxe). I even managed to get my bluetooth keyboard/mouse and Logitech Z-10 speakers and LCD screen to work as they did in XP (using the XP drivers in compatibility mode).

As far as I understand it the Raid-lite system is really just a striped set with the addition of optional mirroring for nominated shares, all handled by the software and configured by the very easy to use console. There’s no limit to how much data you can set as redundant other than the amount of disk space you have (i.e. you need the same amount of free space as you are setting to be redundant, obviously).

I’m still not 100% sure what happens if a drive in the non-redundant pool dies suddenly but I’m assuming anything which was balance to that drive will be lost forever, but that’s really no different to my old system of individual hard drives and there’s the advantage that (hopefully) WHS will warn me ahead of time if a drive is going to die so I can remove it from the storage pool and the files on it will rebalance to the other drives before the target died (hopefully). Some automatic settings to make this happen without intervention would be nice.

From what I’ve read the system uses the boot drive as a scratch area while it balances to the bigger your install drive the better, so yes, use your 1.5Tb drive as the primary boot drive (I wish I’d known this BEFORE I installed mine on a 320Gb).

I promise, once I get another "utility" PC organised I’ll put my WHS server in a closet and stop using my WHS install as a desktop, maybe.

Final note, there is a site entirely dedicated to users of WHS with lots of great hints and tips and a pretty active forum, http://www.wegotserved.com/.

Discuss this post here.

That old phrase seems pretty apt right now. Life has thrown us a few curveballs, none of which are fatal thankfully, but we are certainly going through a ‘this sucks’ patch.

Sick dogs, sick kids, slow times at work and then 300mm of rain in less than 2 days. This turned our backyard from this:

Into this:

and ended up damaging the carpet in my office. I KNOW this isn’t the end of the world, but I can’t wait for 2009, the International Year of Suck to be over.

This also explains the lack of posts in the last couple of weeks too

- Scoobs

P.S. Pepe just moved house too, thus nothing from him. Scratch is just slack, haha.

Well Relic’s DOW2 is a good game; not as great as COH is IMO, given their use of GFW Live and the lack of arranged team 2vs2, no push to talk etc… but wait!!! Relic are renowned for their post release game support, and once again look to be delivering.

Posted up the community DOW2 site are a list of some of the forthcoming changes, which I’ll reproduce here:

• We are adding a Two-on-Two game mode, with two new four player maps.
• Two-on-Two is a ranked game mode with leaderboard support.
• An improved, more challenging Skirmish AI.
• Push to talk voice chat and Company of Heroes style sub-selection options.
• New squad decorators and significant UI improvements.
• A performance test to help measure Dawn of War II performance.

It’s like Relic has read my mind. The first 4 bullet points probably resolve my greatest irritations with the game, outside of the voice acting and sounds of the space marines. As I mainly play comp stomps with friends, tougher AI will be most welcome, as currently the AI manages to make Noobs like me look professional. More personalisation of the in game units is also an excellent addition.

We can expect the patch sometime in May, although with Relic, you never know.

As for Demigod, Stardock are steadily improving the experience, from a networking point of view. The game really is excellent, oozes quality, but is still a hit or miss affair online using the in-game matchmaking service.

Stardock are regularly updating the forums with their progress on this front, and are fairly honest about the problems that exist. I’m more confident now that things will be resolved, but it still looks like another week or so before the kinks are finally ironed out.

In the meantime, many players wanting to get into large custom games are being encouraged to use Gameranger, which operates a little like Hamachi as far as I am aware. Gameranger are also being kind enough to require patched versions of Demigod, which ought to make life a little harder for pirates, and make it easier for legitimate users to find a game on the service.

Comments are welcome in the forums

DOW2 Thread

Demigod Thread

- Scoobs

I recently bought a 2005 Mazda2 for my wife and wanted to do something about the lack of audio options by giving it iPod connectivity… here’s how I did it.

Mazda2 iPod / MP3 Mod

- Pepe

Well, I’ve been travelling a bit, but I managed to get a few Demigod single player games in beforehand, along with a lot of Peggle since I’ve arrived here.

First to Demigod; well it’s a very fun game. It’s beautiful and addictive and has just the right amount of ‘cheesiness’. It also has some ‘cool’ element that I can’t quite put my finger on. I’ve still not ventured online, but almost daily updates from the developers are giving me a lot of hope of the game crossing the final hurdle into greatness. Apparently we’ll (Australia, Europe at least) will be getting a proxy server for the game to assist with connectivity problems. Improvements are being made to the lobby, the interface and the behind the scenes networking.

Oh, I nearly forgot, if you have trouble launching demigod, there are known issues with Comodo and with Google Desktop. There is a stub exe from the developers available on the website that might help. This thread contains a link to the stub exe and helpful advice on game-launch problems.

It’s a shame Stardock borked the release window, but the signs are very promising. Stardock are also promising a more interesting single player experience in the not too distant future.

Since I’ve been up in the sunnier climes of Queensland, I’ve had a few ‘hot-seat’ games of Peggle (at night) with people standing around the computer groaning, cheering or otherwise carrying on. Such a simple game, soooo addictive. It reminded me of the arcade days when I used to meet up with friends and play R-Type, Mario, Gauntlet etc in front of groups of people. I do kind of miss those more ‘social’ days. One can see how the Wii manages to suck so many families in really (socially I mean).

I’ll be firing up Sins of a Solar Empire (Entrenchment) tonight, assuming Peggle doesn’t nudge it out of the road

We have a ‘what have you been playing thread’ right here. Feel free to contribute

- Scoobs

One has to feel for Stardock, they’ve got a great anti-DRM stance, have good customer support and maintain a pretty open position on their forums. Unfortunately, the launch of Demigod has been a disaster, and it’s due to a combination of relatively unrelated factors, the disastrous combination of which would be difficult to predict in advance:

1. Demigod is a multiplayer-focussed game

2. The game phones home to the server on opening, to check for updates

3. Gamestop release the game 4-days early

4. The servers aren’t really ready for customers ahead of the launch date

5. More than 100,000 pirates try to play the game, ahead of, and after the launch date

6. Stardock did not anticipate a flood of users on launch, but instead planned on a steady increase in users (as this is what happened with Sins)

7. Games reviews will most likely occur in advance of the launch date, up to a few days later

You might be getting the idea on what the likely outcome is.

So, because of an unfortunate programming choice (why phone home for updates on application launch?), and the sheer volume of pirates grabbing the game at day zero (thanks to Gamestop going out early), the limited Stardock server infrastructure caved in, in what was effectively an ‘own-goal’ DOS attack.

This left all the legitimate customers with a barely functional multiplayer game, lots of fan rage on the official forums, and some review sites then gave the game a low score (Gamespot 6.5 for instance) because of the unplayable state.

Oh dear.

Stardock have been working frantically to fix the problem, and it’s looking promising right now that we’ll have a working Demigod game perhaps as soon as today. I really feel for them, and I hope people don’t overlook what is shaping up to be a very good DOTA-style game.

The debacle also brings reviews into question. How do you review a mp game at the day of launch? Gamespot, to their credit, have indicated they will revisit the game sometime soon and give it another chance. 1up have refused to review the game until today, giving Stardock a second chance. Will other review sites be so kind? Should they? I’d be pretty annoyed if I read a glowing review of a game that didn’t work when I fired it up… yet the gameplay will improve dramitically over the coming days, but probably after the ‘review window’ has closed and metacritic is an unforgiving place.

I predict that some will try and use this incident as an excuse to push DRM agendas further, but really, the blame lies partly with Stardock for bad networking choices and poor advance planning of their server loads, and mainly with Gamestop breaking the street date and causing the kafuffle in the first place. Had pirates only gotten their hands on the game at launch, Stardock most likely would have been able to direct legitimate users to a different update/login/mp server. Even if Stardock had had DRM in the game, it would have been cracked well before the official launch date.

You can be sure Gamestop doesn’t care

- Scoobs

Comments are welcome RIGHT HERE

Last week, the Australian Government announced that the national broadband network (NBN) would be built by none-other than itself, and not one of the various applicants that had been jockeying for the job over the last 6 months or so.

And we all rejoiced!

Well, most of us anyway. There are the usual short-sighted fools who think that national infrastructure can be built ‘for-profit’ and run as a straight-up business. What rubbish! Rail and road infrastructure certainly doesn’t operate that way (look at the high rate of failed privatisation of these to see what the alternatives are), and the NBN is the ‘highway’ for the future. The rate of return on this kind of infrastructure is difficult to calculate, but is no doubt too slow (or too hard to capture for profit) for most private companies.

Much of the negative analysis I’ve read fails to see the add-on benefit to the economy from the presence of such infrastructure, and none of us really can see just how much technology will change in the next decade or so. My bet is that we’ll look back on the current adsl network (and Telstra monopoly) as an amusing yet horrifying chapter in our communications history, much like we laugh at the thoughts that a 14.4 modem was all we were ever going to need a decade earlier! 43billion is a lot of money, but what was the equivalent cost of putting in our national road infrastructure? These things don’t come cheap!

The benefits of having Telstra out of the picture are also great. It has single-handedly held us back to maximise its own profits. I can’t wait to see them compete on real terms with the other telcos – consumers will be the winner.

It’s nice to have something positive to talk about, in terms of broadband in Australia, so here’s hoping our undemocratic senate pass the ‘ok’ without any problems.

- Scoobs

Feel free to comment here

I’m a big fan of a bunch of webcomics, but one of my favourites is Girl Genius.

The artists behind this actually drew some of my favourite collectable cards from the old Jyhad/V:TES days, and the style has evolved but is still very distinctive.

Below is a portion of one of the comics, which I found hilarious and feel the need to share. It’s out of context a bit, but shows you the style and humour commonly present in the series. Girl Genius is a Steam Punk type comic, so if you are vaguely interested in that sort of thing, please go and check it out. Buy their stuff! You can also buy the comics in pdf format these days (not as good as the real thing, but probably the most realistic way for a disparate audience to get their hands on the art!)

By the way, if the Foglio’s dislike me putting this portion up, just let us know in the forums!

- Scoobs

Well I managed to have a busy week at work, plus a nasty cold to make it more fun. Human bodies suck.

Anyway, on the gaming side of things, I finally had a go at FEAR (yes the original) and have been playing it off an on all week.

Although it looks a little dated, it still plays very well i.e. the shooting is fun, the explosives in particular are cool, and the enemy dudes are challenging if you don’t cheat The story is engaging despite being clichéd, but they manage to spoil the atmosphere sometimes by inserting obvious ‘game’ elements that jar you out of the world they’ve built.

For example, the boosters to health and ‘bullet time’, which could be explained away as some sort of high-end experimental military tech, are found lying around in dark corners of a water treatment facility… on crates, behind pipes etc. It’s stupid! The weapon caches are sometimes well done e.g. at security stations, but man, the office workers in the US must be well armed chaps! They all bring pistols and rifles to work!

Despite that, I’m enjoying it, because shooting in the game is so much fun. If you, like me, passed this over on release, I recommend grabbing it on the cheap and giving it a go. I may even move onto the sequel, although the reviews I’ve listened to (podcasts) indicate that the plot elements are still largely unresolved.

- Scoobs