For all you Minecrack addicts who are interested in growing up to something beyond 8 bit square graphics, or perhaps have too many virtual callouses from swinging the darn pickaxe... have you thought of OpenSim?
Download the Imprudence Viewer (or another Second Life Viewer, but I recommend Imprudence 1.4) from here.
Set up an account with "OS Grid" and log into the universe. I'll be launching a node shortly and can give you guys each a region to call your very own.
If you're still lost - it's the open-source version of Second Life without the monthly fees. And since I have my own server, you'll be able to make your own stuff, etc.
The best part is that even if I shut my server down, all of your inventory items remain in the grid for you to use in the general universe (with whatever region restrictions might exist.)
Jun 28, 2011
Jun 25, 2011
The Space Barbie Failure Cascade
Author's note: I am not an EVE player. The month I spent in the game amounted to nothing; I can decipher only about a dozen of the game's billions of acronyms. I've tried to understand this controversy – if only on a superficial level – in an effort to give my EVE-enabled friends a clearer picture of the causes and the consequences of all the turmoil.
Icelandic developer CCP deployed the "Incarna" update to EVE Online a few days ago. The new features include the long-awaited "Captain's Quarters" (CQ) environment which, among other things, allows players to view their avatars in a clickable mirror.
The source of the late unrest is another feature of Incarna: the so-called "Noble Exchange" (NeX). It's a new boutique market from which players can buy vanity gear (at absurd prices) to customize their avatars. CCP created a third currency – dubbed "Aurum" – to drive that market.
To obtain Aurum, players must convert it from PLEX, the "Pilot License Extension" that, until now, could only be used to purchase additional subscription time, or sold for ISK. Technically, PLEX is more of an item than a currency, but it still functions as a medium of exchange in EVE's in-game economy. If player wants something from NeX, there are two options: (1) spend ISK to buy PLEX on the market, and convert the PLEX to Aurum, or (2) use real-world money to buy PLEX from CCP, and convert it to Aurum.
As things currently stand, the introductions of NeX and Aurum shouldn't unbalance the EVE economy. Players have had the ability to use real money to buy virtual money (via PLEX → ISK) since 2009. Although most of the vanity items available are ridiculously expensive in real-world terms – the price of a monocle is about $70 at present – those items have no substantive effect on the game world. Players can buy all the "Precision Boots" they want with ISK (and keep their subscriptions going, besides) without spending a dollar of real money, and it amounts to nothing more than a currency sink in EVE's economy.
The problem is that CCP is considering making other, actually useful, items available through NeX.
Jun 24, 2011
Jun 19, 2011
Sega Hacked, 1.3M Accounts Stolen. How Long Before Steam?
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/165499/20110619/sega-hacked-1-3-million-users-information-compromised.htm
And in a show of mass stupidity that explains just how disconnected mass media is from the entire situation - almost every article comments about how LulzSec wants to help track down the hackers. Apparently they all missed the sarcasm in the LulzSec twitter post they are referencing. What's really interesting - the LulzSec twitter post was made two days before Sega announced it was hacked...
How long before our Steam accounts are compromised? I recommend everyone make sure your steam password is NOT the same as your email password. With both logins the same, there's no strength behind the Steam two-factor authentication, because it relies on sending you an email. If your steam password gets hacked, and the password is the same on the email account attached to your steam account, you're done.
And don't think that "encrypting" passwords by the company does any good. I've seen someone demonstrate using four nVidia video cards to crack passwords to the tune of thousands of passwords decrypted per minute. You gotta figure with four nvidia 580 cards, you get 2048 CPU cores that can be used to crack passwords simultaneously - they fall like cards.
Oh, and the password you DO use for steam? I'd recommend at least 12 characters or longer. It's only a matter of time.
And in a show of mass stupidity that explains just how disconnected mass media is from the entire situation - almost every article comments about how LulzSec wants to help track down the hackers. Apparently they all missed the sarcasm in the LulzSec twitter post they are referencing. What's really interesting - the LulzSec twitter post was made two days before Sega announced it was hacked...
How long before our Steam accounts are compromised? I recommend everyone make sure your steam password is NOT the same as your email password. With both logins the same, there's no strength behind the Steam two-factor authentication, because it relies on sending you an email. If your steam password gets hacked, and the password is the same on the email account attached to your steam account, you're done.
And don't think that "encrypting" passwords by the company does any good. I've seen someone demonstrate using four nVidia video cards to crack passwords to the tune of thousands of passwords decrypted per minute. You gotta figure with four nvidia 580 cards, you get 2048 CPU cores that can be used to crack passwords simultaneously - they fall like cards.
Oh, and the password you DO use for steam? I'd recommend at least 12 characters or longer. It's only a matter of time.
Jun 17, 2011
BioWare Hacked
Alberta based BioWare was recently hacked, eh?
http://www.torontosun.com/2011/06/17/alberta-gaming-company-hit-by-hackers
18,000 user accounts compromised. If you have a login with them you might want to change your password. And please, please please - don't reuse passwords on multiple sites! Definitely don't reuse Twitter and Facebook passwords because that's the first place someone with access to it will try.
"Zabiuk said one of the key pieces of information hackers are looking for are credit card numbers, but passwords and user ID's are also valuable since many people use the same one for several accounts, making it easy for thieves to access accounts such as PayPal or iTunes."
http://www.torontosun.com/2011/06/17/alberta-gaming-company-hit-by-hackers
18,000 user accounts compromised. If you have a login with them you might want to change your password. And please, please please - don't reuse passwords on multiple sites! Definitely don't reuse Twitter and Facebook passwords because that's the first place someone with access to it will try.
"Zabiuk said one of the key pieces of information hackers are looking for are credit card numbers, but passwords and user ID's are also valuable since many people use the same one for several accounts, making it easy for thieves to access accounts such as PayPal or iTunes."
Jun 16, 2011
Jun 14, 2011
Security Through... Well, No Security.
Hot on the heals of the Bethesda hack where LulzSec stole the Brink source code and player database...
Today they hacked and took down Eve Online. And Escapist Magazine. And the Minecraft login server. Escapist and Minecraft appear to be DDOS attacks.
Jun 13, 2011
A Bit of Nostalgia
A new book has been published online at Smashwords by Robinson Mason, "A Commodore 64 Walkabout":
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/65936
It goes into details of how to set up a Commodore 64 emulator and the various games and genres available for it.
More importantly, Chapter four has quite a long interview with me... It seems that I was somewhat influential back in the 1980's. Whatever happened to that? ;-)
Mason is an Analyst at HP, and writes Sci-Fi novels on the side. He also has a huge fascination with 1980's tech.
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/65936
It goes into details of how to set up a Commodore 64 emulator and the various games and genres available for it.
More importantly, Chapter four has quite a long interview with me... It seems that I was somewhat influential back in the 1980's. Whatever happened to that? ;-)
Mason is an Analyst at HP, and writes Sci-Fi novels on the side. He also has a huge fascination with 1980's tech.
Jun 6, 2011
Ruminations at Random
A couple of observations about the videos from the last post:
1. The most interesting thing about E3's parade of best-foot-forwarding is this: BF3's in-game footage often looks better than the cinematic trailers of other games. DICE seems to have figured out that graphics and aesthetics are not the same thing, and they're using the former to drive the latter. That might be the biggest step any developer takes this year.
2. It seems that BioWare has had their own epiphany with the final installment of Mass Effect. Shepard can now roll and vault over cover while running. Why? Because cover is boring.
3. There's been some talk of ramping-up the RPG elements with ME3, but it's still going rely heavily on the "guns and conversation" motif that has become ME's hallmark. What this means, three games in, is that the narrative arc is going to have be pitch-perfect all the way to the credits. Anything less will be viewed as a disappointment.
4. It was a good move to spotlight the combat mechanics in Rage, even if we've seen some fairly substantial bits of it already. Up close, the injury and death animations for the NPC's are better than I've seen (or noticed before) in a shooter -- with the possible exception of Condemned: Criminal Origins. Unfortunately, I'm still not terribly interested in the game. It pains me to say that, because I have a whole wing in my gaming memory dedicated to Id.
5. Dead Island is losing me a little more with every trailer. I like the "Far Cry with zombies" concept, but I forsee a Borderlands-like repetitiveness on the horizon. And seriously, everything associated with guns just looks wrong. How the hell do you mess that up?
6. Ghost Recon: Future Soldier has a lot of nice little details in it, but still has the feel of a game that should have been released two years ago. All that tactical shooter/squad commander stuff has been done into the dirt with Rainbow 6, Arma, Operation Flashpoint, and GR itself, and Future Soldier's novelties probably won't bring enough to the table to generate a lot of interest. The irony is that the closer the game creeps towards "mainstream" shooter status -- in an effort to broaden its appeal -- the more it's going to have to compete with MW3 and BF3. Niche games occupy a niche for a reason.
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