Wipeout HD

Today is a good day to own a PS3. Wipeout HD has finally been released, and it is awesome. The motion controls are solid, the graphics are solid, the soundtrack is solid, the game modes are solid, the online play is solid...

It's been since 1999 that a Playstation console (excluding PSP) has had a good version of Wipeout, which was Wipeout 3. W3 is still eminently playable, as it was a benchmark for its time. The problem was the Wipeout Fusion on the PS2 failed for several reasons. It had its good points, such as zone mode and generally good graphics in-game. But on the whole, it just failed to satisfy.

Anyway, that's all water under the bridge now. After two successful versions of Wipeout on the PSP, Studio Liverpool has returned to the big console in a big way.

At $22, it's very hard to get better value than you get with this game. I could easily have forked $60 for a Bluray disc of this game and I'd still be happy. Actually, I think I'd prefer that to permanently taking up 1 GB of space on the PS3's hard drive.

I'm going to go race some more now.

Soul Calibur IV online

While the game journalists were all clamoring because Virtua Fighter 5 didn't have online, I was saying that a game where you can jab your opponent in 1/10 of a second wouldn't work online.

Soul Calibur IV has online play, and it's dodgy at best. If you think about it, with talk time (ping) between clients being at least 40 milliseconds, and often higher, fast moves are already half-way to hitting you before you even see they're coming. When the ping is higher, it's unplayable.

One of my opponents saw the game was lagging, and so would get as far from me as possible, then start to run at me. After tackling me, they'd do it again. Starting a move to hit a running target while accounting for an unspecified lag-time before your move will start is difficult at best. So while their strategy would never, ever work in a local match, it was very difficult to beat online with lag.

Today, I noticed my opponent seemed to be starting the round before me. So I watched very carefully, and sure enough: he was able to start a move at the beginning of the round at least a half-second before I could. If both players deal with identical lag, then at least the situation affects both players equally. In this case, it was very unfair to me.

This is a case of the general public demanding a bad feature be put into a game largely because they're unaware of the technical constraints of online gaming. Games like Soul Calibur and Tekken are heavily dependent on split-second timing, and are therefore very intolerant of lag problems.

Many game types work just fine online; in the case of racing games, your opponent's positions can be extrapolated from last-known positions since a car is unable to change its momentum that much from frame to frame.

But we all know that if Tekken 6 doesn't have online play, and DOA 5 does, that DOA 5 would have a significant sales advantage. So Namco has to put online play into Tekken 6, even though they are probably aware that Tekken just isn't Tekken when played online.

Maybe I'm all wrong, and it's just that Namco has implemented SCIV's online mode poorly. But I sincerely doubt it.

EVE-Online: The Covetor BPO, Part 2

So, if you read this, you may want to know what eventually happened.

I happened across someone selling a fully researched Covetor BPO in high-sec, for 2.35 billion ISK. That means I pay them 350 million for researching it (which takes a month), and delivering it to high-sec for me.

Before accepting the contract, I had to be very careful to make sure the item I would get was what I thought it would be. There are a lot of contract-scammers who do things like post a Tech 1 variant of a ship (worth 900 million), but they put the Tech 2 variant (worth 4 billion) in the name of the contract. If you're not very careful, you get ripped-off. Over time, CCP (EVE's developer) has made the contracts clearer about what's in them, but apparently many people are still fooled.

I wasn't fooled. We got the BPO, and it's now happily turning out BPCs so BM2 can start to make and sell Hulks.

EVE-Online: The Covetor BPO, Part 1

BM2 has almost enough money to buy the holy grail of mining-ship BPOs, the Covetor BPO.

First, an explanation. A BPO is a Blueprint Original. These represent the information you need to build ships. These are one of the few items generated in EVE by the NPC market. Hence, the one we're after has a fixed price at the NPC station it's sold from. In most cases, BPOs are sold in a variety of places, and usually in high-sec (where non-consensual PvP is punished by the police). As such, normally you find a nearby station that sells the BPO you want, and you go get it.

Another power associated with owning a BPO is the ability to do "invention." This takes a BPC (Blueprint Copy), some other materials, and attempts to create a Tech II variant BPC of the item the BPO is for. BPCs are just like BPOs, except they can only make a set number of their item, then they disappear. In our case, we'd want to make Hulk BPCs; Hulks are the best mining ships in the game, hence Hulk BPCs are sought-after items. Since this is the only way to make Hulks (unless you own a fabled Hulk BPO from before the introduction of invention), the Covetor BPO is a crucial element in the world of EVE.

Here's the ugly bit: You can only get the Covetor BPO from a small NPC mining firm (ORE, Outer Ring Excavations) which is about 15 jumps into null-sec (where there are no rules about PvP), and it costs 2 billion ISK. My corporation's assets total about 4 billion, so this is going to be a huge investment. The dilemma I face is because of this (click to enlarge):



This is the entire map of EVE, with each dot being a solar system. I have the colors representing players killed in the last 24 hours. You can see that about 5 or 6 spots stick out; the one nearest the bottom is on the path from our HQ to ORE. That system (PF-346) is the 0.0 entry point from high-sec. These gateway systems are heavily camped to make access to 0.0 more difficult. PF-346 is a particularly notorious one, which is probably because there is no buffer zone of low-sec between it and high-sec.

The risk then is that I'd pay roughly have my corp's assets for this BPO, then get destroyed while on my way back to high-sec. The risk is great enough that Covetor BPOs sold by players on the high-sec market usually go for 2.5 billion ISK, which is rather large mark-up.

So I have to decide among three options:

1. Sneak out to ORE myself in a Covert Ops ship (which can cloak still travel at normal speed) and try to sneak the BPO back.
2. Pay a friend to sneak out in a Covert Ops ship and bring it back.
3. Pay the market premium for delivery to high-sec.

• Option 1 is dangerous since I'm not practiced in 0.0 PvP. I'd stand a decent chance of getting caught.

• Option 2 is better, but it's still risky, and my friends may not want to take responsibility for half my corp's assets.

• Option 3 is safest, but increases the cost of the BPO by 25%.

I'll post again once I have this whole issue figured out.

Virtools: Interface Design Error

So I'm learning Virtools at work. It's a 3D engine that's supposed to be good for prototyping. I can't comment on that, since I'm still in the early stages of its steep learning curve. At least I have help from someone who used to work at the company that develops it!

Anyway, I found a serious error in its interface design. I opened a list in a panel, and it went further than the bottom of the panel. So a scrollbar appeared... on the left. That struck me immediately as odd; I couldn't remember having seen a scroll bar on the left before. Then as I tried to open and close a bunch of lists in quick succession, the problem became apparent.


So once you've opened the list by clicking the arrow (the red spot in the image), your mouse pointer is no longer on the arrow to close it! So now you have to move the pointer over a little if you want to close the list. Now imagine what you have to do to open and close 5 of these as fast as possible. If the scroll bar were on the right, where it belongs, there would be no problem.

It's these little things that make the difference between an irritating interface and a really nice one.