Lost Coast.

I like Half-Life 2. The first one was a little annoying as it became a bit of a platform jumper near the end, but the second one never seemed to get just plain annoying to me.

Recently, a couple days ago in fact, Valve released the HDR tech demo "Lost Coast" which happens to be set in the Half-Life universe. (I have previously talked about this move here.) I played through the game part in about 15 minutes. This included spending some time just admiring the view I may add.

Just as an aside, the minimum recommended specs for the game are not quite met by my computer, I need a slightly faster processor to get it to stop complaining to me. It does seem to handle alright though. I was able to play through at 1600x1200 without much trouble. The HDR effects don't always work quite right on my too-dark monitor, but do pretty well. I did have trouble with the commentary part at those settings, and ended up dropping resolution to 1024x768 to go through it with the commentary enabled.

HDR is neat and adds a lot visually to a game. My monitor is getting old and runs dim - so it isn't as well done for me as it could be. What I do know is that running Day of Defeat Source at a buddies place with my 17" LAN Party "mobile" monitor it was noticeable and nice though. Maybe in a couple years I'll get an LCD to replace my current CRT - or it may all wait until I can get a new system.

What I want to share is the commentary. The last time I have seen something similar is while playing Medal of Honor Pacific Assault: Director's Edition. Many games have special editions with "making of" features available on the disc, but in this game there were historical fact pop-ups during game play. These were actually pretty interesting, but they killed gameplay as they were intrusive and didn't pause/stop/effect the action in any way. Taking the time to read them basically means you aren't taking the time to play the game.

Lost Coast has done it differently. There are 14 comment points in the game. They will occasionally take control of the game for you to show you what they are for. They range in content from technology showcases to design decisions. The points at which they can be activated are very obvious, and they can be de-activated at any time.

They put a context on "making of" that is hard to explain without actually experiencing it. They never detract as you can have them turned off, as I did the first time I played. Turning them on they are still not intrusive, although they do basically preclude total immersion. Since you have to turn them on for this effect it is assumed that at this point immersion isn't that important anyhow.

I remember the first time I watched a movie with the commentary track. It was very interesting. I was able to hear and understand the reasoning that went into what I saw on the screen. This was similar to that experience, only better. The same way a good video game is much better than a good movie, that same video game having commentary during actual play is better than a watching clips of a game with commentary. The ability to look what is being talked about on your own terms is just as good as the ability to explore an environment on your own terms.

The last comment mentions that they are doing the in-game commentary as an experiment and would like to gather feedback. I for one would like them to do this with more games, and other designers/producers as well. Done right it would make the extra money for a special edition a lot more worth it than some video clips, interviews (that can usually be found on-line) and a cloth map.

Amazon.com

So, I signed up for Amazon affiliates this weekend. This is in preperation for joining my brother in a "team blog" idea that he has. Since he'll be doing the maintenance and hosting he'll be getting the (minimal) google ads revenue. Eventually if it were to become an actual revenue stream this model would be examined - but for now I'll need links from amazon to get anywhere. As this blog actually has a chance to go somewhere I decided to go ahead and set-up.

That's all for now. Coming soon: Half-Life 2: Lost Coast musings...

The Vehicle Decision

So, for starters I am nowhere near as regular with this blog as I would like, and not nearly as up on various news as I would like either.

For the first one, I guess it can partially be attributed to the idea of competition as my older brother has a blog and I immediately commented to him that I would withhold judgment for a month.

(For the record, it is still going (although still broken in IE as of earlier today) and I must concede that it looks like he's managed to make it over the "exploratory stage" and will be publishing regularly, more than I can say for myself as of now.)

For the second one I used to have a blog, but have since deleted it. I had managed to keep it up with some decent insights on the state of gaming and gaming news for awhile even - but eventually it lost out to school as a time focus.

Anyhow, on to my point. the vehicle decision previously mentioned. I was thinking about it the other day and decided it would be much more fun to surprise people. Granted, I am sure that only my older brother reads this blog, but you never know what kind of random google search you'll come up on these days.

So, I am going to track the whole decision/purchase/attaining process and eventually will post stuff about it. Probably around my birthday, January 24th. We figure we'll be in a new vehicle before Christmas as mine is getting pretty bad so this leaves a good couple of months to make sure most of our friends/family have been surprised.

That's all for now. I am working on creating a standard weekly schedule for myself to include working out, school, time with family, and blogging (probably squeezed in with school). Once I have the details hammered out I'll probably write a segment on that quick as I don't have a ton of other stuff to blog about what with the major purchase decision facing us being kept secret...

(Funny note, on runing the on-line spellcheck "blog" "google" and "blogging" were identified as unknown/misspelled words...)

Time to buy a car.

So, Heather and I have known for almost a year that we need to eventually buy a car, probably sooner rather than later. We finally made the decision this weekend.

Our two options have been a Chrysler Town & Country Touring or a Mini Cooper S. Amazingly, the options we want on each put their prices at almost the exact same.

One of the driving reasons behind getting a minivan is the future family we want to have. We need something larger than a sub-compact or compact car for that. Neither of us is in a hurry to deal with baby seats in a small car. Another reason is for when family visit from out of town. Getting more than two people from the airport is basically impossible in a small car, and only one of us can go get two people.

The Mini is more of a fun car and has an advantage of easily fitting in the existing garage space, and better fuel efficiency. It will also retain its re-sale value better, comes with a 3-year maintenance warranty on top of the 4-year warranty (3 years standard for the minivan), and has a 12 year unlimited mile rust-free guarantee.

We have spent a lot of time looking at the different options and trying to figure out which would be better for us as a family.

In the next day or two I guess I’ll start detailing the process and how it goes for us (with some added history) – I guess I finally found something to write about a little bit more regularly huh?

Killing Creativity (take 2).

I just lost 30 minutes of ferocious typing a small rant about database classes being boring.

In this rant I identified these database classes as the current root of all evil in my life. I think the loss of the work has proved the point.

So. My goal is to write at least two more decent, meaningful posts before my database classes are over. I figure once they're done I'll be back to my full working capacity. My regular creativity and need to share thoughts will return and I'll be more effective at work as well.

I'll start those posts by the solution we find to a particular problem we're having at work. This problem is with a new domain controller we are trying to get deployed. I'll post more later, I already typed a big old post on that to a forum earlier today.

A Goal

Near the beginning of my upper division classes were two programming classes.  In these classes we learned to program using Java.  I was pretty happy with this as one of my goals is to move out of support and administration and into application development.  Now I have a problem.

The only way to really learn a programming language is to use it.  I am working full time and attending University of Phoenix online full-time.  I hope to get my bachelors by 30.  This means I need to stick to the class schedule and find a way to squeeze in three lower division classes to finish my requirements.  That gets me graduated right before my birthday.

The problem is in adding Java study and programming to the mix.  A dream is to be able to pass the J2SE certification by the time I graduate.  This gives me the degree, the cert, and my experience in support/admin roles to move forward with.  I would theoretically have at least one custom-built application as well.  (How else would I learn enough to pass the exam?)

I currently have three concepts I would love to turn into programs.  Two are games and one is a utility.  I have more conceptualized for the utility and will probably start on it soon.  It has the added benefit that it will do well with a built-in database of some kind and I am in database classes right now.

The time problem is simple.  I have very few hours left in the week after working and school, and by the time I get to them my brain is usually close to burnt out.  I have taken three weeks to read a chapter of “thinking in Java” for instance.  I have managed to find database software to use, and obviously know what platform I am programming on. (I may try scaling to J2ME in the future…)   The next step that I see is building the database and then building the program from the back on forward.

As I have time to move forward on this and reflect on where it is at I’ll post progress and “lessons learned.”  Hopefully, by the time I graduate I’ll have an actual shareware product available for download…