Team Fortress 2

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So I got online last night and immediately noticed that Steam said that Ryan and Bruce were both online & playing Team Fortress 2. It had been quite a while since I'd played Team Fortress 2 so I decided to fire it up. I'd seen a lot of talk about TF2 on the game blogs recently and I didn't really know why. After a bit of research I now know that its because of a major content patch (and Sniper class refresh) that they've recently released.

After joining the same game Ryan was in, I quickly realized that since TF2 runs on the Halflife 2 Engine, my new gaming PC I built a month or so back runs it brilliantly. The second thing I noticed were achievements and achievement that I'd earned displayed as 0. Apparently the last time I'd played TF2, achievements didn't exist yet within the gameand now they've implemented a system in which you can unlock new weapons and items within the game the longer you play. In fact, this recent content patch changed this unlocking system from an achievement-based grind to a system in which every 20-30 minutes of play, you have a good change at randomly unlocking an item. Due to past problems with players all playing a certain class (in order to unlock a new item for that class) it's now COMPLETELY randomized when you unlock something to encourage a diversity of classes within any given game. This, for instance, encourages me to play an Engineer but allows me to randomly unlock a sniper item. Again - I have no control over what gets unlocked. It's random. There is no way to control what gets unlocked, therefore, there is no reason for me to play a class I'm not super fond of, just to unlock the items for that class.

I like this.

This new system of unlocking items does have it's critics though. Some players have complained that since they had unlocked many items before this system was put in place via the old achievement based unlock system, that now under the new system they're starting to randomly unlock items that they've already unlocked. In order words, it gets progressively more difficult to get items you haven't gotten yet unless you get lucky. I can see how this could probably be a problem but it doesn't concern me as much for now as practically anything I might unlock, I do not yet have. Short sighted? Probably..... but I'll bitch about that bridge when I get to it. For now I'm happy that I've rediscovered a game that I already own and therefore, do not have to pay for in order to enjoy it.

 

Curse and WoWInterface Declare War on the WoW Community

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So WoWInterface & the Curse sites have blocked WoWMatrix. Today. On patch day. Do they seriously want hundreds of thousands of angry people with torches and pitchforks at their doorstep? They claim that they are in the "right" because WoWMatrix is "stealing" from them. They say you should use their own respective craptacular addon update clients. The problem is that for all the well intentioned efforts of WOWI and Curse, they are simply too busy/incompetent/unfocussed enough to provide a decent client experience. Add to this their need to try to restrict everyone to one site only and you have a model that flies directly in the face of what is ideal for users.

Obviously, we can't have what is ideal for users (free everything + one click updating + cross site addon support). So while the site maintainers can claim they're all eager to make users happy, that isn't their end goal, it's to make sure they have a functional business model. Hmmm....who does this sound like? Oh yeah, I know...THE RIAA!

There's nothing wrong with that. The part that annoys me is their unwillingness to let someone else do the work to make the users happy. There is a significant community out there that can write very functional and user-friendly updaters that work cross platform. Why not punt off the hard work of writing a non-retarded updater to them?

There was an ace updater back in the day. It worked flawlessly with the ace repo, and was quite pleasant to use. The author wanted to make it work with Curse, and when he spoke to the Curse guys, the response was 'go away, it's our client or nothing, we don't want one click updating, we want to force everyone to click through ads'. Now, that makes sense from a business perspective, but let's not pretend it's in the best interest of users.

Given the lack of resources/skill/willingness to develop useful clients, wouldn't it be better if the site maintainers instead focussed on their piece of the puzzle, the sites themselves? Why not for example allow for a web API to query, download, and update addons? Why not allow such a service for premium customers only? That way I can write an updater and ask them for their curse credentials or API key, and I can tell users that my addon is only useful if they pay up to Curse/WOWI/whoever. I can evolve it at my own rate, as can any number of developers, and we'd all stop being held hostage by the woefully inadequate, highly dysfunctional, and rarely updated Curse client.

I have no interest in 'stealing' from anyone. However, I will also happily steal if you won't give me a good alternative, and I'm sorry but right now the website and curse clients are very far from 'good alternatives'. I would happily download music before from newsgroups/bittorrent/napster/kazaa, nowadays I check itunes first because I'm happy to support the industry and the application that Just Works. The same applies to wow addons.

I for one will be cheering for WoWMatrix to work around whatever measures Curse/WOWI put in place. In turn, I stronly urge that WoWI & Curse find another method to make money rather than trying to protect their business model - at the expense of their users. Until that happens, a big F*** You to WoW Interface & Curse and a huge shout out to WoW Matrix to quickly circumvent whatever blocking they have put in place.

Intel discusse Larrabee, a possible ATI and Nvidia killer, launching as early as 2009

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While Intel's Larrabee might not be a household name for consumers just yet, it's certainly at the table where Nvidia and AMD/ATI eat. The many-core (8 to 48, at least, according to that Intel graphic) x86 chip runs all your existing apps while tossing in support for OpenGL and DirectX thus eliminating the need for a discrete graphics chip. At least that's the plan. While the exact number of cores remains a secret as does the performance of each core compared to current GPUs, given the importance Intel places on Larrabee, it's reasonable to assume that an 8-core chip will launch in 2009 or 2010 with comparable performance to GPUs on the market at that time. Intel does say that Larrabee cores will scale "almost linearly" (read: within 10%) in games; that means that a 16-core chip will offer nearly twice the performance of an 8-core chip, 32-cores twice that of 16, and so on. Apparently this has already been proven in-house with Intel name-dropping Larrabee-coded titles such as Gears of War, FEAR, and Half-Life 2, Episode 2. It's no coincidence then to hear that Intel's first Larrabee product will target PC gamers. Click through if you're just dying to read about Larrabee's 1024 bits-wide bi-directional ring network and other bits of technical wonderment sure to create at least the hint of a silicon malaise.

News via CNET and Washington Post