Battlechicken’s Challenge

Posted by Feliz on May 9, 2012 in Blog, Everquest, Everquest II, Fallen Earth, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Vanguard, World of Warcraft | 2 comments

As part of the Newbie Blogger Initative Battlechicken has challenged the bloggers to tell her Why We Do What We Do, preferably in pictures. Here’s a small collection of my characters, the result of 12 years playing MMOs, who is answering the question.

Feliz: I am a yodel bard			Sambaugh: Watching your back
Dimo: I heard they had cheese and pimp hats		Minsk: Barfights and barmaids!		Plintenegger: I’ve got Death Touches
Plinkocommie: Goblins of Azeroth unite!			Dimkski: The Lich King is dead
Shamble: Looking into a radiant future		Dime: There’s a vision, always was, always will		Shambles: I am your father, Feliz

A Colossal Cave Adventure

Posted by Feliz on May 8, 2012 in Blog | 6 comments

This article is going to date me, but looking at some sites on my blog roll, I am sure, I am not alone.

Way back, as a Computer Science student I spent a lot of time in the computer terminal room. Much more time than my fellow students, but about the same time as my friend who was living on the same dorm floor as I. Aside from our assignments we did a lot of research, aka snooping around. Of course we found something, a FORTRAN program called Adventure.

Trouble was, we couldn’t just run it in the terminal room. Those 20 terminals were lined up along the 4 walls without any dividers. Everybody could see what the others were doing. The terminals were shared between 1000 students with varying needs of access. As long as it looked like serious work, we were fine. To play, we either had to wait until the room was empty (fat chance) or visit the smaller terminal room at the local university at night or drive all the way to the Heidelberg data center.

All this was running on the IBM/370 mainframe computer of the University of Heidelberg, who gave terminal access to  our college. This was not the internet, the terminals were just that, some monitor and a keyboard. Cables were running into a box twice the size of today’s computer tower. It ultimately connected us to the mainframe some 20 miles away at mind blowing speeds. Did I mention, the terminals where 80×24 characters, green or amber on black? RAM at the mainframe had just been upgraded to a whooping 4 Mbyte, and each interactive session had 4 minutes of CPU time assigned, which was just enough for 3-4 hours of play.

This is what we finally saw on our terminals. It’s one of the very first text adventure games ever. It lets you explore a colossal cave, with huge halls, labyrinths and get occasionally annoyed by a wandering dwarf who throws an axe at you. And don’t forget the bridge troll. You can still play it on the internet here.

This kept us busy for a semester or two, until we started working on a side project for a company which gave us a loaner micro computer. There weren’t any IBM PCs around it could have been compatible to. It was an Ontel Op-1. It had a 5 1/2″ diskette drive and a BASIC interpreter. One of the first things my friend and I did was to port the FORTRAN program into BASIC and let it use the diskette to store the text, otherwise it would have been to big for the 55 kByte left useable by the interpreter.

And what did I get out of all this aside from entertainment? Education. I got plenty of my professional skills just by dealing with this,  by today’s standards, simple program. I never went into the games industry, which at that point in time not  even existed and only a couple of years later started to grow in the US. But it gave me experience in dealing with software projects, something I could actually mention in interviews as a college graduate.

It wasn’t the first computer game I encountered. The first one was a moon landing program on my TI-57 programmable calculator. The second one was a small chess computer, which moved a tower from the sidelines back onto the field when it got into trouble. It’s been a long way from a 10 digit LED display, an 80×24 terminal to todays 1920×1080 pixel standard and 3D models. Going from text based, to Pac-Man, to Pools of Radiance, to Baldur’s Gate, to Everquest, WOW and Guildwars 2. It’s been a long trip.

A shoutout goes to the “/con mmob blog” and this article about MUDs for the insporation for this article.

Getting RSS From News Sites Without a Feed

Posted by Feliz on May 6, 2012 in Blog, Star Wars: The Old Republic | 0 comments

When I started out collecting feeds for Google Reader I noticed quickly, that there are webpages of MMORPG’s without a usable RSS feed. It seems that with the availability of Facebook and Twitter a few companies have decided they don’t need to provide RSS feeds anymore. But there is help in the form of feed43.com. They allow you to create your own feed for any news page you want. You have to define the search rules yourself, but once it’s done you can subscribe to the result in Google Reader.  It’s only updated every six hours, but it beats going to that webpage all the time. And the real beauty  is, you can share the feed.

And that’s what I am going to do. So far I have only two and I am working on a third:

• SWTOR Dev Tracker http://feed43.com/swtor-devtracker.xml
• Neverwinter MMO News http://feed43.com/nwmmo.xml
• Fallen Earth Frontpage News http://feed43.com/fallenearth.xml

For instance Dev-Tracker pages are often without RSS feeds, since the forum software doesn’t really support it. Should you know of any MMORPG websites without a RSS feed, feel free to ask for it in the comment section, I’ll see what I can do. I’ll keep this list up to date as it grows.

Friday is Link Love Day

Posted by Feliz on May 4, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

It is a frequent occurrence, that our fellow bloggers publish a weekly wrap up about things that happened the past week, things they have read or stuff that’s still on some notepad and never grew into a blog post. Here’s my first one.

What happened last week?

• Syp’s of Bio Break started the Newbie Blogger Initiative with great success. Right now 75 sponsor blogs and 60 newbie blogs are part of it. I played it safe and signed up on both sides
• I got my Adsense back, without any explanation from Google and a “reboot or power cycle” kind of response to my trouble ticket.
• Elder Scrolls Online got announced. Lots of things written about it throughout the blogosphere.My only concern: If they can’t provide a PC style interface and insist on console type controls, I won’t look no further. Channeling Roger Murtaugh. “I am to old for this sh*t”
• My wife got Beta access to Mists of Pandaria. I’ll have a peek or two.

Things I read elsewhere

• Multiple posts with technical advice from Belghast at Tales of the Aggronaut.
• Great general blogging advice from Suzita at Starshadow. And there are more coming
• A series of great articles by Wasdstomp. The latest is titled Create Your Own Voice
• Then I found the blogs of Kadomi (Live Like a Nerd) and Paeroka (Nerdy bookahs and their travel guide). They are fellow Germans who have been blogging for a good while longer than I have.
• And then there’s Maruka at Neurotic Girl who’s outed herself as an altaholic.

What’s left on my notepad?

• Make a To Do list. ✔
• Check off the first thing on the To Do list. ✔
• Realize you have completed two  three things. ✔
• Reward yourself (in progress)