blueZhift Blog

Here’s what looks like a cool tool from MIT to get your feet wet in 3D modeling and simulation without a lot of pain. And it’s free! From the StarLogo site:

StarLogo TNG is The Next Generation of StarLogo modeling and simulation software. While this version holds true to the premise of StarLogo as a tool to create and understand simulations of complex systems, it also brings with it several advances. Through TNG we hope to

1. Lower the barrier to entry for programming by making programming easier.
2. Entice more young people into programming through tools that facilitate making games.
3. Create compelling 3D worlds that encompass rich games and simulations.

This looks like something my little artists could really get their teeth into!

After an earlier story on Next Generation, that the big games expo E3 was being cancelled for next year, ars technica is reporting that the show is not being cancelled but downsized. Much of the reason for this was described as the show being too expensive for companies and not really being a place to get any serious business done. These are certainly valid points, but I think that they are missing the much larger value of the show for the electronic entertainment industry.

The games industry does not currently have any awards shows that compare in stature to the Oscars of the movie industry or the Grammys of the music industry. These award extravaganza’s are opportunities for these industries to promote their best and brightest to the public. Right now E3 in the marketing and hype-fest it has become, serves that very purpose. E3 is what puts the games industry on the map for the public. And at a time when games are striving to be on equal footing with other entertainment media, killing or downsizing E3 would be a mistake. It would also be a mistake for the big players to pull out muttering about costs. The publicity they can get is well worth the cost, as long as they bring their A-game. And while it is a long shot in the best of times, there’s always the chance that one of the little guys will break through and get noticed.

E3 needs to love and embrace the hype, not try to run from it. Open it up wide to the public and charge an admission price that can help bring down the exhibitor costs. Bring back the booth babes in all their glory and just enjoy the love fest that will launch a million consoles into the homes of the adoring public.

I’ve been having a pretty good gaming weekend. A few days ago I got some much needed help from a higher level player to get the magicked skull I needed in order to complete the subjob quest. I had obtained the other items such as the damsel fly worm and the crab apron on my own with other parties. Well actually, it would be more accurate to say that he got the skull for me while I waited near the entrance of the Gusgen Mines. Later he provided a much needed guide and escort on the way to Jueno where I completed the Chocobo license quest having farmed the gausebit grass I needed myself weeks earlier in Dangruf Wadi.

I really enjoyed the company and appreciated the help. But I wonder if he may have been a little swayed by the cute blonde avatar I use in the game. I guess you could say I’m one of those guys tarting up online world to paraphrase the recent CNet article concerning female impersonation in online games. The guy helping me out seemed to be one of those genuinely helpful people who likes helping other players. When he asked me if I was a real female or a manthra, he said it was cool if I didn’t want to answer that question. So I didn’t. Generally, my policy is to come clean when asked, but my experience has been that other players prefer to maintain the illusion. This is all part of the fun of playing a game in the first place. So I told him that for purposes of the game, I’m a girl. Also, since I wouldn’t last 5 minutes in the areas we were traveling through, I really didn’t want to be abandoned. Why do I play that way? Not to get free stuff. I play that way because I like the look of the female character models and a female persona suits my relatively nonaggressive playstyle. I make no attempts to play in any kind of stereotypical fashion beyond the occasional /blush where appropriate.

So this weekend has been a lot of fun! I got my chocobo license and rode back to Bastok (remember to change chocobos at Crag Dem). Once back I began leveling white mage (WHM) to eventually sub with warrior (WAR). WAR/WHM should be a good solo combo and attractive to parties when there aren’t any WHM around. Final Fantasy XI is a game that is pretty easy to solo at the first 10 levels, but after that you need to get help for every other major advancement. I’m not the most social person on Earth, so if a cute blonde avatar helps me out a little bit there, I guess I can’t complain.

I thought that connecting my Xbox 360 to my PC monitor to take advantage of HD graphics without plunking down a metric ton of money for HDTV was brilliant and frugal (as frugal as one gets with these kinds of toys at least). So in the interest of further brilliance, I thought, how cool would it be to use my PC’s snazzy new USB keyboard with the 360 through the use of a KVM switch. My old keyboard was pre-ps/2 style, so it had a giant plug which I later had to plug into ps/2 style adapter. The whole thing hung precariously off the back on my PC and of late was suspected of causing problems on occasion. So after about 10 years of service, I wanted to change everything over to usb and the keyboard I picked up was only $20 USD.

I’ve had pretty good luck with Belkin products and I figured since they’re sold at Apple stores too, they are probably of pretty good quality in general. So I gave little thought to buying a Belkin KVM switch (F1DK102 U 2-port). And the switch even has built in cables. I got it home and connected everything as instructed, ready to retire my compact keyboard from the PS2 setup at last. Well, the thing didn’t work as planned at all. The PC keyboard was not being recognized when I switched to the Xbox 360. I could plug it in directly and it worked, so that meant a problem with the switch.

Then last night I stumbled upon a solution. I disconnected the USB mouse from the switch and plugged it into the PC directly since I didn’t need the mouse for Final Fantasy XI at all, and I thought that maybe it was confusing the issue. Next after playing around with the switch and powering up the Xbox and switching back and forth, I figured it out. The Xbox 360 apparently scans its USB ports only on power up. Therefore, if a device is not recognized during this time, it doesn’t get support. So by manually switching the KVM to the 360 and then quickly powering up, before the KVM autoswitches back to the PC, the keyboard is recognized.

The thing that made this difficult is that the Belkin KVM will switch back to the PC if it doesn’t detect that the Xbox is on via a powered USB port. The delay is about 2 or 3 seconds, so I think this is manageable. Still, if I had known this would be a problem, I would have sought out a switch that this strictly manual. As for the Xbox 360 itself, if it would only check for new devices optionally after power up, like PCs and Macs can, that would also solve this problem.

I don’t know if moving the mouse from the switch had anything to do with any of this, but I’m going to leave it connected to the PC for now. I hope this entry will be of use to anyone who has had this problem. I reported the problem to Xbox Live support, just so that there’d be a record of it. Perhaps a future update to the Dashboard will address this issue.

As World of Warcraft has grown to over 7 million players worldwide, I’ve noticed something about the game that I don’t ever recall seeing in any other game. The price of the game from Amazon.com goes up and down. Usually when a game comes out, it will start at one of the canonical prices, say $39.99 USD. And if the game is successful, the price will generally drop $10 to $20 to spur further sales and compete better with new titles. After this price drop, there are generally no further price changes over the life of the title.

I’ve noticed that the Amazon price of World of Warcraft does not follow this pattern. I’ve seen it as low as $26.99 USD and recently as high as $36.99. The fluctuations remind me more of a stock than a game title. And like a stock, perhaps there is money to be made on these fluctuations. One possible explanation for the fluctuations are gold farmer account bans. Blizzard periodically bans accounts found to be involved in real money trade (RMT) wherein in-game items are farmed and traded for real money. RMT is a violation of the terms of service all players agree to when they sign up. RMT has grown to such an extent that Blizzard may ban thousands of accounts at any given time. But there is nothing that prevents a banned player from buying a new copy of the game and using a different account to pay the subscription cost to get back in.

This sort of thing happens with all of the big online games, but in a game with over 7 million players we may be seeing the effects of massive bans on the retail price of the game. Companies involved in RMT are not going to go out of business quietly because there is obviously a demand for their services. So buying new copies of the game and setting up new accounts is just part of the business. The sudden demand for new copies after a ban probably pushes up the retail price of the game. So if the enterprising trader can buy copies of the game when the price is low, there may be money to be made after massive bans. I may just start tracking this myself to see if there really is a correlation.

Next week I’m heading to Baltimore for Otakon for the 2nd year in a row. There’ll be about 20K anime, manga, and all out East Asian pop culture fans in attendance. Most of these people will be much younger than I am. But that really doesn’t bother me at all. Why should I give up the things that I love and that are fun to me, just because I’m older?

Well it appears that I am not alone in these thoughts! We are many, and now we have a name, Rejuveniles! I’m not sure I like the way that sounds though because it implies a lack of taking adult responsibilty. And that is certainly not the case for me, or likely most of those other kindred spirits. We pay our bills and work hard too. But who, better than aging adults, knows that time is short? I still believe in Heaven, but I want to have fun here too, just wanna have fun…

OMG, what’s happened to New Zealand? Has it been taken over by prudish grandmothers? An ad for the Nissan Tiida featuring sexy banter from Sex and the City star, Kim Cattrall has been banned in New Zealand. Personally, I think the ad is a bit tame, but heck this gives me an excuse to see if I can link in a YouTube video properly. And heck, I still think Kim Cattrall, who also played Valeris in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, is pretty damn sexy. I might even buy a Tiida some day!

Yesterday, after what was apparently a long illness, my PC died… It was very inconvenient since I had work to do, but once again it was instructive and perhaps ultimately useful. For one thing it taught me that Windows is not very fault tolerant. Even in a crippled state, I could still boot Ubuntu, which helped me a great deal in diagnostics and research to fix the problem which ultimately turned out to be a faulty motherboard. I replaced the Mach Speed board with an ABit, which was the only one I could find at Microcenter which still supported the Athon XP 2800+ I’ve been using for almost two years now. Why stick with a now ancient CPU? Well, it just works and is quite good enough for what I do.

I realize now that my earlier rant against PC gaming was really the result of my failing motherboard. Nevertheless, I’m still glad I decided to do my Final Fantasy XI gaming on an Xbox 360 rather than stay on the PC. In the old days, I used games like Doom to benchmark my PC’s performance, but these days I have little patience for balky PCs when I want to play games. So today I’m catching up on work delayed by my PC’s temporary rigor mortis happy that having Ubuntu around as a spare has saved the day.

Microsoft has confirmed that they are launching a music player under the Zune brand that will compete with Apple’s iPod. Already a lot of the hubbub on the internet is the usual anti-Microsoft rhetoric. But I don’t think people should be so quick to write of Microsoft’s chances of success so soon.

I would guess that in the first year, the primary victims of Microsoft’s direct entry into the market will be the companies currentle partnered with them under the Plays for Sure label. Some may see this as sad or a betrayal, but hey they’ve been working at it for years, and not a single one of them has made much of a dent in the iPod’s dominance of the digital player market which current stands at over 80%. So in Microsoft’s eyes, they’ve had their chance.
And, as I’m sure others have noted, for Microsoft it isn’t just about selling players or songs for 99 cents. It’s really about the future of the digital rights management (DRM) and media format they’ve championed on Windows. So far Apple has refused to license their DRM to 3rd parties, but if they did, there’s a chance that Microsoft’s current partners would abandon Windows media in favor of Apple. Without a player of their own, that would leave Microsoft in a bad position.

I think that if Microsoft can bring some real innovation to the game, it will be good for consumers all around. Open, direct competition between Apple and Microsoft should bring better players and software for all concerned as they fight for new customers. I’m not planning to abandon my iPod anytime soon. But I do look forward to the enhancements from Apple to the iPod and iTunes that a strong competitor is likely to inspire.

While one would hardly say that cosplay in Japan is mainstream, one could say that seeing cosplayers in various public venues is not unusual. In Chicago, seeing cosplayers in public is definitely unusual, even more so when the temperatures approach 100 degrees F as they did this past Sunday. Nevertheless, a hardy group of fun-loving cosplayers from the Chicagoland Cosplay Club, and friends, gathered in Chicago’s Millenium Park last Sunday.

When I first heard of this on the Anime Central Forums, I was very curious not only about the cosplayers, but what the general public reaction was likely to be. So I charged my camera, filled my water bottle, and headed to the park to check it out. When I caught up with them, they were gathered at the large “bean” sculpture and from that point made their way over to the fountains where some wet and wild cosplay ensued. I certainly had not expected this, but the people on the streets and the police were friendly and basically just took it in stride. Does this mean Chicago is ready for more cosplay? I don’t know, but I certainly wouldn’t mind!

Here are some pictures I took. Enjoy!

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