Thoughts

You Can Die in the Tutorial

James — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 06:08:29 +0000

Well I've now finished the Military career mission arc. Pretty solid introduction to PvE'ing touching on resists, aiming, firing, moving, etc. It finishes up with a mission that you will be destroyed in unless you were paying attention. It's nice to know some of the true nature of EVE makes it into the tutorial stuff. Also got a new frigate gifted as part of one of the missions. I am now flying a Tristan. Depending on what happens in the near future I may ditch it and get myself a Catalyst.

Now I'm off to a Sisters of Eve agent for what I believe is the start of the beginner epic arc. Never done an Epic arc so this should be quite interesting.

EVE Has a Tutorial?

James — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 08:18:04 +0000

Well here I am in the tutorial every new player gets dropped into.

This is already a vast improvement over the tutorial I got when I started. You get dropped into what I understand is a deadspace complex with a few asteroids and a single rat which orbits around. This is good because it gets people right into the game without being shocked by the menus and everything else you get when docked in a station. This part of the tutorial takes you through the core movement and combat skills. After that's done it gets you to dock up at the only station in system. This is interesting as they get you to use the dock order which warps you to zero automatically instead of getting you to warp to zero first and then dock. I can understand using just the dock as it leaves the explicit warp-to instruction till later. As a 0.0 veteran I'm more used to warping to zero before doing any action so the straight up dock seems a bit odd.

Another interesting addition to the tutorial is this big white box that floats around when the tutorial wants you to do something with the UI. I think this is awesome as it gives new players this big "LOOK HERE" thing to speed up their initial learning instead of the hunting for the 10px x 10px that might have been flashing back when I started. Another really nice feature of this is that if you have a window over the button or item then the overlapping window will become transparent so you can see the button or item the big white box is pointing to.

The way the tutorial only spawns items as you need them for a specific step in the tutorial is nice. Instead of flooding the new user with a million items you start off with nothing but a Civilian Damage Control and the first ship you destroy has the classic 1 piece of Trit waiting for you as loot.

The tutorial also links to EVElopedia pages on subjects that the space and time of the tut doesn't really allow.

The explicit tutorial steps for joining a player corp are great compared to when I started. Mainly because the tutorial now covers them.

The career missions are an interesting addition. I went and bought a combat frig before finding out that the next mission gave you one as a reward. So I'm going to follow the mission arc until finished so I don't jump ahead and waste any more ISK. Especially as I'm not going to help myself to my main's stash.

Well that was an interesting evening. Will continue to work at this and see what happens.

The Experienced EVE Noob

James — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 05:28:23 +0000

It's been awhile since I last played EVE so I've been looking back and trying to figure out why. Was it burnout or just boredom or something else? The conclusion I came to was a combination of burnout of trying to keep up with all the 0.0 and corpie happenings and just getting a bit bored of the ISK grind but I still love the idea and most of the execution of the game.

So the other day an idea popped into my head. Start from scratch.

Now like almost all long time EVE players I have one alt to go along with my main. But that alt was pretty much speed trained right into a role that I wanted at the time. She never had to mission, grind or anything because of her sugar daddy main. But it has been so long since I was that noob we all were sitting in that Moa fitted with missiles and small hybrids that I though it would be interesting to do it all over again but with the advantage of knowing what I'm doing.

Of course I'm making it harder for myself to keep it interesting. I'll be moving into deep lowsec and try to live there. The stomping grounds of loners and pirates. It should be interesting. I plan to post the occaisional update on what it's like to be an EVE noob through the eyes of an experienced player.

First iPhone Post

James — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 05:45:28 +0000

Just trying out my new toy. :)

Adding Attachments with ActionMailer

James — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 09:46:32 +0000

Well recently I had the fun task of using Ruby on Rails' ActionMailer to create some automated emails to send out to users. At some point it was decided to attach the original email we received from the user to the notification email we were sending out to the user.

Now you would think that using the attachments method provided by ActionMailer would make it a easy as just giving it the file you wanted to add. Turns out it's like that for Ruby on Rails 3, not for 2.

The most infuriating thing was that if you use the attachments method then the method you called attachments from will not render the default view template it would normally. This means you have to explicitly call the render method.

Instead of putting it out all nicely I'll just link to a blog post from ELCtech.com that explains it well. http://www.elctech.com/ -- [ActionMailer] Multipart emails with attachments

A New Point Release on Life

James — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 09:43:55 +0000

Well after over 23 years living under the roof provided by my parents I have moved out into a flat. It's been an interesting experience so far and I'm flatting with good people so I haven't been stressing out too much. I've also been hired by the company that I was interning for over the summer so I am now a fully paid up member of society. ;)

And I finally got an ISP sorted out so I'm back on the internet after a weeklong non-work use vacation.

Trying out the iPhone app

James — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 03:42:59 +0000

I've only got an iPod Touch but thought I'd see what this app is like.

Maybe I'll get more use out of it once I get an iPhone.

DC++ "Could Not Open Target File" Error

James — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 09:40:33 +0000

I was at a LAN the other week and to make sharing files easier we use a program called DC++. Shortly after trying to download the first few files I got a confusing error. "could not open target file: the system cannot find the path specified" After spending much time looking around the web and asking friends at the LAN we finally figured out what it meant.

In the Settings window and under the Downloads section you designate two directories, one is a default download directory and the other is an unfinished donloads directory. I had these two options set to directories that did not exist, a quick change however did not quite work as while the folders exist they were under an account the active account could not access, a final change pointed these options to two directories that existed and the account could acces. This fixed the problem right up.

So here's a little picture to show the two offending text boxes. Set these to folders your account can access, folders on your desktop for example, and that error should disappear.

My Borderlands Troubles

James — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 09:29:04 +0000

Being a Good Consumer

Last week I purchased the Borderlands DLC, Zombie Island of Dr Ned, for my PC Retail version of Borderlands. After purchasing it I was informed I would also have to install the 1.1 update so that was downloaded as well.

We've Got a Problem

My first attempt to update Borderlands resulted in a catch-all error dialog informing me that the update had failed. After looking on the Gearbox forums I got pointed at running the update from the command prompt using the "msiexec" program. http://gbxforums.gearboxsoftware.com/showthread.php?t=87233 - (FIX) Fatal Error:Installation ended prematurely because of an error. This resulted in the patch doing the same "Gathering information about your computer" routine as the original patch attempt and silently exiting without doing anything. A quick check on the "msiexec" program's help dialog showed a logging flag which I set and posted the output of that and the dxdiag output on the Gearbox forums. http://gbxforums.gearboxsoftware.com/showthread.php?p=1721935 - Unable to Install Patch or Zombie DLC - Windows 7 - Error 1603

You Didn't. Did You?

This is when things got interesting. Soon after I read a new post of someone having a similar problem as me and posted a suggestion to run the "msiexec" program with the logging flag set. A reply post by another member to mine said that would be pointless as "we know where the patch is try to write to" This gave me an idea which prompted me to look through the "msiexec" log to try and answer. A quick search for the drive that I installed Borderlands to (E:) found nothing. A search for the 32 and 64 bit Program Files directories on the C drive found both. Now my question was a pretty simple one, did the patch and DLC require that the game be installed in the Program Files directory on the C drive? A question in the FIX thread brought no answer after several days so I decided to give it a go and reinstalled Borderlands to my "C:\Program Files(x86)\" folder.

You Did

And guess what, the patch and DLC installed without a hitch.

For a game developer to not allow the patch to be installed to wherever the program has been installed is just unacceptable when every other game I have patched has never required it.

New S92A Proposal Up

James — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 22:17:39 +0000

Just a heads up for anyone that's interested in the Section 92A proposal. The Cabinet Paper is up on the Ministry of Economic Development's website and it's a 32 page PDF. I'll try to read it during the weekend and post my thoughts on it.

Cabinet Paper: Illegal Peer-To-Peer file sharing