Month: August 2010

Games

Brandon and I finally finished our game of Sword of the Stars on Monday. It’s a turn based 4x game, so we don’t both have to be active the entire time, which works nicely for doing it while doing other things. Considering the game took us about two weeks (playing about half those nights) for about 250 turns in a 3 team, 6 player (the two of us on one team, and 4 ai making the other two teams) game with 201 stars, it’s not exactly a game that is easy to put together with people you don’t know and at least partially share a schedule with.

We came across a couple bugs that prompted research, so I might as well repeat what we found here:

First off, we were playing with the Argos Naval Yard expansion. I got the game from Steam, but Brandon got his copy from GamersGate, but we figured the games should be identical despite different distribution mechanisms. Steam didn’t have the latest patch (1.8) pushed out, but the patch from somewhere else happily applied. We ran into trouble with that on the second turn of the game. Apparently the Steam version didn’t behave the same way with the patch, so after completing the first turn we got a “Synch error detected” message, and upon completing the second turn the person not hosting the game would get disconnected. We worked around that by both uninstalling and reinstalling to base ANY, after which our games were willing to cooperate. That shouldn’t be an issue anymore since Steam finally pushed out patch 1.8 before Sunday (when I downloaded it) and we were able to both update and finish the game using 1.8.

The other problem we’ve been having is that combat loads very slowly in windowed mode, and it seemed like the more ships the longer the load time. The load bar gets part way across the screen, then the window freezes (according to win7), and eventually it starts going again and is loaded. The longest load time I had was when I was assaulting with a massive fleet (I wasn’t bothering with repairing damaged ships, so my fleet designed to last to the end of the game had far more ships than are reasonable) and waited over 15 minutes for combat to load. We both have multiple monitors, and at least for me full screen doesn’t play nicely with WoW running on the other screen, so we play in windowed mode. I don’t usually pay attention to the load times since I alt-tab to whatever is on my other monitor when they come up, but it was driving Brandon crazy. He found out that not only does that not happen in full-screen mode, but switching to full-screen and back would prevent the freeze and keep load times reasonable.

In other news, I just saw what appeared to be gameplay footage of Portal 2, which is the game I’m most looking forward to currently.

Actually, alot of that footage appears to be from here on the official site, but I hadn’t seen any of it before today.

Portal was an awesome puzzle game that revolved around a gun that allows you to shoot two portals onto the walls (or floor, ceiling, wherever you could find the right type of surface), which you could then step through to move around, bridge gaps, or fling yourself. The main drawback of the game was how short it was. The entire storyline could be finished in a matter of hours, and after that the challenge maps are the only thing left to do. Not only have I played through the story multiple times, but I’ve gotten the gold metal on all but one of the challenges (use few/no portals, take very few steps, be fast, each applied to 6 different maps).

Portal 2 is promising a longer story and co-op, as well as a bunch of other things to push through portals to achieve survival. The “Thermal Discouragement Beam” looks like fun, and from the videos the combination of the “Excursion Funnel” and different gels should be decidedly interesting.

The weekend

Instead of her usual waking me up at 6 something by meowing insistently in the other room, Talore woke me up at 7 this morning by sitting with her head 6 inches in front of mine purring loudly at me, then as soon as I went to pet her she retreated out of reach.

I finally uncovered my chairs yesterday (I had boxes and stuff on them to keep Talore from picking at the fabric of the cushions).  She still picks at them occasionally, but if I look at her and say “No” she stops.  Talore doesn’t seem to mind that they lean back now (when I first got her she wouldn’t even stand on them) since she both walks all over them and has gone to sleep on one.  She either walks up the chair next to it or just jumps to get to the cat bed I have next to the balcony window where it’s high enough to see over the railing.

Half of the clothes pin I have the feathery toy tied to is missing.  I had it clipped on the fan above Talore yesterday, but she eventually just ignored it and went to sleep.  At that point I figured I might as well take it off the fan so it wouldn’t keep swishing by, but I forgot I had the fan on lowest instead of medium and pulled the cord twice.  At full speed the thread caught on the pull chain, wound up, and popped the clothes pin off the fan blade.  The clothespin twisted coming off and one side came out from under the spring that held it together and the side with the spring flew off, hit the wall, and fell behind something.  I wasn’t paying attention to what direction the sound came from and I haven’t found it yet.

Talore now is quite willing to tolerate going in the cat carrier in return for a cat treat.  For probably a week I would put her in it, then feed her a cat treat (after she got out to start with, then while she was in it when she was used to it enough to not be in panic/escape mode).  At first I figured it was at least giving me practice at getting her in when she didn’t want to go, but she did start getting used to it somewhat.  This last week I’ve been sitting her in front of it, then putting a treat in the carrier and waiting there till she went in to get it.  I have to hold her in front of it so she doesn’t wander away (she’ll sneak back and take it while I’m not looking if I let her leave), but she has now entered the carrier several times without me having to force her in.  Next step is to get her to go in, then feed her the cat treat, though I don’t know if she’ll go for that.

I spent a couple hours working on my rubik’s cubes yesterday.  My average time on the 5x5x5 is 14:36 minutes with four solves.  I should have kept track of the time for each step of solving it, and I know I’m getting faster at the first ones (the ones unique to the 5 cube, or at least to big cubes).  Still, it takes so long to scramble and solve it’s hard to work on it much.  For the 3 cube I went to update my time when I got to work on Friday and was just in time to see Tom updating his times.  His (newly updated) single best was one second faster than mine, and his 3 of 5 was three or four seconds faster.  Calvin still has us both beat, but we’re catching up since he hasn’t been improving his times.  That was part of what prompted over an hour spent on the 3 cube yesterday, but I think I’ve finally got a solid second place single solve time with a 29.13s solve.  It didn’t seem spectacularly lucky when I was doing it till the last step so if I hadn’t been using a timer that keeps a log I’d have thought I accidentally touched it and restarted it during the solve, but considering I had gotten a few solves that nearly matched my previous record that weren’t lucky solves I shouldn’t have been too surprised.  Unfortunately I was getting great times (sub 45s) about once every 5 solves with mostly mediocre times (of 50-55) around them so I only dropped my 3 of 5 by half a second.  It seems like fast solves are now more dependent on me spotting the last steps quickly and not messing up the new algorithms I know than they are on getting a good start.

Also: “something negative about Emee”  I was assured that if I posted that Emee would hear about it.  I’m sure that’s not what Dad meant, but I couldn’t resist.

The feathery toy and the ceiling fan

I ended up just tying the thread directly to the headless feathery toy. That way it doesn’t have enough weight to throw around effectively (which is a good thing, since it means there’s not enough weight for it to bother Talore if I throw it at her), but it’s still interesting enough to chase.

Also with it that light, I can hang it from the ceiling fan (clothes pinned to the outside edge) and not only is it too light to damage anything it hits, but it mostly hangs toward the center of the fan since it has so much drag for its weight. If Talore actually catches it well enough it comes unclipped (that’s happened once) and the clothespin flies off somewhere, but she almost never manages to grab it.