Dear Santa, thank you for the dolls and pencils and the fish. It's Easter now, so I hope I didn't wake you but... honest, it is an emergency. There's a crack in my wall. Aunt Sharon says it's just an ordinary crack, but I know its not cause at night there's voices so... please please can you send someone to fix it? Or a policeman, or...
Back in a moment.
Thank you Santa.

Video Cards 'R' Us

For a couple of years it was easy to recommend a video card: just buy whatever Nvidia had in your price range. After a somewhat awkward start with the NV1, Nvidia shot to the lead of the graphics market and stayed there . Competitors like 3DFX went broke trying to catch up. Others abandoned the broader market to try to carve comfortable niches for themselves at the periphery. As the GeForce 2, 3 and 4 rolled out, Nvidia looked unstoppable.

Then something happened. ATI came from behind and started narrowing the gap very quickly indeed. Nvidia needed a new chip to show that they were still the undisputed champions of the graphics world, they needed it to be fast, and the needed it now.

What they got was the GeForce FX: late, expensive, absurdly power hungry, and not all that much faster than the previous model. Meanwhile ATI rolled on, launching new models in all directions: the 9000, the 9200, the 9500, the 9500 Pro, the 9600, the 9700, the 9700 Pro, the 9800... Of course, a 9500 Pro is faster than the 9600. Is a 9700 Pro faster than a 9800? Who knows?

Dan does. At Dansdata he delves deep into the question of which video card, without - and this is important - without bludgeoning you to death with statistics and misleading bar-graphs. (Hardware reviewers should be forced to read Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information before they are allowed anywhere near a keyboard.)

If you're not looking for a new graphics card right now (and if you shelled out for a GeForce4 4600 Ultra last year like me, I can't blame you), then you obviously need either (a) a tiny radio controlled tank, (b) a really nifty collection of nifty magnets, or (c) a kitten. Warning: Purchasing two or more of these simultaneously may prove hazardous to your continued well-being.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:41 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 322 words, total size 2 kb.

Good News, Everyone!

AnimeSuki is back! If you get the "Those idiots..." page, you'll just need to hit reload. Or if you're running IE, which is a bit fuzzy on the whole "reload" concept, you may need to reboot a couple of times.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:05 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 46 words, total size 1 kb.

Neverwinter Update

I've been looking over the white cliffs of... no.

I've been taking closer look at the various hakpacks developed for Neverwinter Nights. At first, I thought that not that much had changed in the last few months. Then I realised that I was looking in the wrong place. Then I found the right place.

Yow. People have been busy.

I like the looks of this swamp. This strange city is cool too. Here's an alternate version of the standard dungeon. These drylands tilesets are a welcome change from the standard greenery. Drow fans will find this castle and this temple rewarding. And I quite liked this nicely decorated castle.

Here's a list of all of the general-purpose tilesets - there's 173 of them - and another list of the tilesets tied to specific adventures. There's 213 of those. The original game came with eight. There are also 58 combination tilesets, getting around the problem of only being able to use one tileset at a time, and 37 all-in-one tilesets. I'm not sure how you can have 37 different all-in-ones, but there you are.

Update: Here's a view of the Elemental Plane of Cheese. And here are some Cheese Elementals. These are Nacho Cheese Elementals:

This is what happens when you over microwave nacho cheese, and it becomes a planar vortex to the plane of cheese. Or there may be other reasons, but oh well. They Burn people to death with their boiling cheesiness!

I'm sure they do! Here's a Ninja Cow. There's also a nattily dressed Cow Wizard, but I seem to have lost it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:09 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 267 words, total size 3 kb.

She Sells Sea Lions?

If you're truly bored and it's daytime in San Francisco, why not spend thirty seconds looking at small blurry pictures of small blurry people looking at small blurry sea lions?

Oh, yeah. Here.

I think the sea lions are the things sitting on the rectangular things.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:43 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 54 words, total size 1 kb.

Readers? Or Not Readers?

I just took a look at my Sitemeter referral stats. Endlessly fascinating. Apart from my friends on the JREF Forums, I have a (presumably disappointed) fellow of excellent taste looking to download the Marx Brothers on Bittorrent; a couple of irritated people who were after a review of the Gigabyte GA-7NNXP (I must say it looks good on paper, and I may be getting one when the next pay cheque comes in); more people of discernment looking for Jungle Guu, Tiny Snow Fairy Sugar and Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (AnimeSuki is where I found Jungle Guu, but it's down right now. It is available on Kazaa, partly because I'm sharing it (cough). Likewise MST3K; I have about 20 episodes downloaded and shared - that's around 14GB worth. Sugar is available on DVD, so be nice and buy it.) And someone arriving from gravett.org who I'll forgive for the blinking links because I'm listed in (his? her? its?) blogroll. And a fine blogroll it is too; look at the company I'm in: James Lileks, Glenn Reynolds, Rachel Lucas, Frank J., Emperor Misha, Tim Blair, Mr. Mustard... I mean, I'm down near the bottom of the page, but what a great page to be down near the bottom of. Except for the blue text on a blue background, that is.

For the person who wanted to limit uploads in Bittorrent under Linux: the --max_upload_rate option may do the trick.

The person looking for pictures (presumably) of Guu in the bear suit: sorry, I don't have any.

The Weird Al fans: sorry, I still don't have Poodle Hat. It's not out for another week in Australia.

Wow, there really are a lot of people looking for reviews of the GA-7NNXP. Sorry, I could swear I found one at work on Friday, but it doesn't show up in my searches now. You could do worse than looking here at nForcersHQ or keeping an eye on AMDZone. If you live in Australia (like all right-thinking people), CW Supplies have the GA-7NNXP for $333 and the nearly-as-good GA-7N400 Pro for $239.

As for the people searching on "Nullarbor Plain horned kangaroo" and "mootrix comic", well done! You've discovered Ambient Irony!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:19 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 372 words, total size 2 kb.

Trashing With Style

James Lileks was not impressed with The Matrix Reloaded:

“Um - it’s all underground? The steel mill is entirely underground?”

“That’s right. Tall as a 50-story building, when completed. It will be the world’s biggest underground steel mill.”

“It’ll be the world’s only underground steel mill.”

Nor was Mark Steyn overly enthused with X-Men 2:

Nobody who genuinely loved superheroes would do that to them. The exception is Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, who plays the shape-shifter Mystique. I can’t say Miss Romijn-Stamos’ shape is in much need of shifting, particularly as she spends most of the movie dressed in a kind of skin-tight slime that makes it look as if she’s just emerged from the pit on Lesbian Mud-Wrestling Night at the local sports bar.

Are there any good movies on the horizon, now that Return of the King has been pushed back to 2004? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:36 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 149 words, total size 1 kb.

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 07:16 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 886 words, total size 6 kb.