EVE Online: Manufacturing update

Well, the manufacturing business has really improved since I last mentioned it. We're now building and selling two types of cruisers. We move about 20 of these every 3-4 days, with about 10% profit on them. At a sale price of around 4.25 million ISK a piece, that's a decent amount of incoming funds.

Our operation is about to get much larger though. We're purchasing a battleship blueprint original (BPO). One of these sells for around 65 million ISK; making these will require a lot more mineral gathering and capital investment per item. We can also make blueprint copies (BPC) of it to sell. Buying the BPO will cost us around 700 million ISK. Since it's cheaper to buy minerals and make your own battleship, some people will buy a BPC to make their own ships. The huge cost of a BPO makes selling these possible. Also, BPOs/BPCs have material efficiencies. A fresh BPO has a material waste factor of 10%. By researching the battleship BPO for a month and a half, that can be reduced to 1%. The one we're buying has already been researched to a 1% waste factor, so we won't have to deal with that.

EVE continues to be a very interesting game, even after being in it for almost two years. There's no equivalent of World of Warcraft's Level 70 cap, and the social structures are significantly more complex.

As an example, a friend of mine is in a corporation that pays 10 million ISK per person per month to have "blue" status with another alliance out in 0.0 space. What this means that is that they pay money to be listed to all members of the alliance in 0.0 as blue, which means "friend." In 0.0 there are no rules about who can shoot whom, so it's very important that you be listed as friends with the sovereign alliance where you are. Alliances can put up stations that assert sovereignty over an area. Large coalitions of alliances fight over these stations in a bid for access to the massive resources out in 0.0 space.

Currently, my corporation stays almost entirely in space with a security rating of 0.5 and above (high-sec). We're known as "carebears" in EVE parlance; we mine, manufacture and trade to earn money in the market, and almost never get involved in fights with other players. But we have fun, and that's what counts.

Two demos of useless games on PS3

I'm amazed. I just downloaded the demos for Sega Superstars Tennis and Condemned 2: Bloodshot.

I expected SST to be Virtua Tennis with goofy characters and powers, kind of an extreme version. No such luck: it's a poorly designed game by Sumo Digital. The demo lets you play 1v1 against the CPU for about 3 minutes; one session was enough to convince me not to buy the game. Having to listen to poorly chosen vocal samples for each of 16 different Sega characters each time they win or lose a point is not my idea of a good time. Hitting the ball was very difficult. The computer aced me every shot like 8 times in a row. Unlike Virtua Tennis where just hitting the button will get at least some sort of hit, you have to position yourself in the right place and hit the button at the right time to hit the ball. In principle, this might not be a bad thing. Having to use some amount of skill just to hit the ball can be fun. But the ball doesn't seem to have a shadow! Judging the ball's position is nearly impossible. Maybe I'm missing something, but as a Virtua Tennis veteran, it's just not worth the effort.

The opening story segment of Condemned was rather poor. Poorly written dialog, character models that look like models with bad face textures instead of people, music mixed to loud with respect to the dialog... it was just very unappealing. I can forgive that if that game is fun though. So I go in to play, and... wow. Some of the tutorial text seems to trigger based on where you are; so some of it appeared and disappeared very quickly since I didn't notice it fast enough to stop moving and read it. A guy attacked me, and I tried to kick him a few times. I had no idea what was going on, and I died.

Now that would not necessarily be a problem. I just need to try again right? Well, this is a First Person game, and in these games there's a thing called FOV: Field of View. It refers to how much of an angle from the player's perspective is rendered onto the screen. When I play Quake 3, I have it set to 90 degrees. Any higher, and I get motion sickness. Some people play with it as high as 120 (or even more), while I know some people who can't have it higher than 80 without getting sick. This game is set to around 120. This means I can't play it without getting motion sickness. And with no option to change it, that means I won't be going any further into the game.

I guess I'll just stick with Rock Band, The Club, and my assortment of excellent PSN downloaded games.

Note: I've edited this post since I've learned that Condemned 2 is not a First Person Shooter. It IS however, First Person, and as such, my complaint about FOV stands.

VHEMT: Misguided idealist?

VHEMT is the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. I read about it first in a book called "The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman. It's an interesting book the discusses what would happen if people vanished tomorrow. It covers things like what happens to our pets, our buildings, roads, nuclear power plants, etc. An interesting read; I recommend it.

Before I dis VHEMT, let me state for clarity that I do think there are too many people on the planet already, and that steps need to be taken to control population expansion.

What precipitated this blog entry was the following opinion from Les Knight, founder of VHEMT; it's paraphrased by Weisman, but it still sounds very naive to me. VHEMT suggests we should all stop reproducing right now, and just let humanity die off. He's not a militant who wants more wars or famine or pestilence. But he thinks that voluntary lack of reproduction (or some ailment that blocks reproduction) would be akin to humanity dying in its sleep:

...Knight predicts that spiritual awakening would replace panic, because of a dawning realization that as human life drew toward a close, it was improving. There would be more than enough to eat, and resources would again be plentiful, including water. The seas would replenish. Because new housing wouldn't be necessary, so would forests and wetlands.

He is quoted as saying

"With no more resource conflicts, I doubt we'd be wasting each other's lives in combat."

and

"The last humans could enjoy their final sunsets peacefully, knowing they have returned the planet as close as possible to the Garden of Eden."

First, the voluntary scenario just wouldn't happen. You'd have to convince the religious people of the world to give up their ideas about what they think God has planned for humanity.

Second, his assessment of what it might be like seems so unrealistic to me, I don't even know where to begin. I imagine a scenario more like that in Children of Men. I think resource conflicts would continue. People like to fight to take rather than to earn resources. Greed would not disappear, and you'd still have people trying to take more than their fair share.

Obviously, VHEMT are entitled to their opinions. But I think there are more productive and realistic ways to tackle the human population problem.

Rocketmen: Axis of Evil

I just downloaded and tried this demo from the Playstation Network. There's also an XBox 360 version.

It's a video game taken from a board game. It was programmed with the Torque Game Engine, which is a very inexpensive development system from Garage Games. It's great that Torque is a full-featured game engine with a small price tag that has the ability to make games for the 360 and PS3. However, Rocketmen is not a game that makes "democratization of game development" (as we call it in the industry) encouraging.

It's a double-joystick shooter that has some extra elements like secondary weapons and a weapon customization system. It has a story that is present in a 3-d pseudo-comic book fashion. The basic idea for the game isn't the problem; it's the execution.

The voice acting is very amateurish; it sounds like someone got their friends into the studio. Perhaps it's more a fault of direction than acting, but either way it comes off very stiff. I started skipping the scenes after seeing about 5 of them as they were too stilted and interrupted the flow of the game too much.

The feel of the game itself rather poor, as well. It feels like a cheaply produced web-browser game. There doesn't seem to be a proper balance between the speed your character moves and the speed of your enemies' shots. The automatic camera/level advance system often leaves me unable to collect items my enemies have dropped.

After completing the two levels of the demo, I've seen enough. I don't recommend that anyone actually pay the $10 for the full version. As I write this, I feel it's a rather harsh judgement since I remember being a bedroom game developer. I feel justified though because my stuff may not have looked any more professional, but it was certainly a hell of a lot more fun.