Sean Middleditch

Well, the Age Long event of KANAR is over. Whew. Tough ten days to live through, let me tell you.

As usual, I have tons and tons of stories to tell. Unlike usual, however, I can’t remember near half of them, since many happened too long ago (more than a couple days) and I haven’t had a chance to retell them enough to commit them to memory. ;-)

Suffice it to say, though, that the event turned out quite well for me. I managed to go an entire 10 days without being robbed or dieing (wooj), had a lot of fun in the process, and even managed to make quite a name for myself. I’m now lieutenant of baronial guard, which is quite an accomplishment I think given that I wasn’t in baronial guard at all to begin with.

Last Friday night was a bitch. We stayed up all night long fighting off these big butch woogie monster thingies that kept attacking every 30 minutes like clockwork. Guarding the Baroness can be a real pain in the arse. ;-) Eventually, we pretty much lost. They kept coming, but our resources were limited. Only so much healing magic, only so much health. Captain Orion and I escaped to get help, and the Master Sergeant was captured. Then the Squire was captured; we gave our all in trying to rescue him, and failed. Eventually we got the Baroness and Baronette together and assaulted the tower where the things were coming from, defeated that, and had a fairly happy ending. Except the part where I stayed up all bloody night with no food, no sleep, no water, all for pretty much no damn good reason.

Finally got Exim 4 running on my server. Debian’s packages still seem broken. Luckily, I found out about the exim_convert4r4 script which takes an Exim 3 config file and turns it into an Exim 4 file. It worked pefectly out of the box with the sole exception of the authenticator configurations. For the server side authentication I simply had to move and change the permissions on the mail passwd file. For the client side… well, that took some work. I had a crappy way of doing it before and attempted to update it, and that didn’t work. This update was taken from, surprise, the Debian examples. Hint: those are broken. Got a little more familiar with Exim string expansion functions and got it working. Everything should be going perfectly now. Yay us!

I went to get SPF+SRS working, but still no dice. The Debian packages for the Mail::SPF::Query Perl module are (tada) very incomplete, for one. The best SRS and SPF support for Exim 4 is available only as patches, unfortunately, and having just gotten the thing working properly, I’m a bit adverse to attempting to install any patches just yet. Hopefully they’ll land upstream… someday.

Good game, for the most part. The controls and action were great, although the defense moves were limited. (i.e, block. Later on you can block and move. Much later on block and attack, once.) As always, the game only makes me think of the improvements I’d make to it.

For one, back to the moves, more defense and counter type moves. Would be great to be able to catch an attack with the whip and toss the opponent or something. More environment-based moves would be nice too, like wall jumping or swinging. (The whip-swing action was very weird in this game.)

Probably most importantly, though, would be to make the thing longer. It had 6 areas. Not much at all. I personally like it when a game takes 50-100 hours to finish. So long, at least, as the game stays interesting during that time. 50-100 hours of the same old combat over and over would be boring as hell. Fill that time up with plot (and not just lame cut scenes) and exploration, and you’d have a pretty compelling game. I’ve been wanting a Castlevania game with multiple towns, multiple castles, independent plots, and (gasp) multiple vampires for a while. A couple older games had multiple vampires (like the N64 games), and Lament of Innocence had a minor one that you fought as a boss (and play as a secret character), but to be honest I’d expect a vampire lord’s castle to be crawling with the bastards.

A game where several known vampire lords existed, which you could take on in various order, perhaps multiplayer with some friends (working cooperatively for shared rewards, working independently on different vampires, or working competitively vying for the reward on a single vampire) would rock. A plot could tie together the vampire lords, and the game could even continue infinitely by generating new “random” vampires, although a console probably couldn’t handle all this without at least a hard-drive. If the whole world could be (at least partially) randomly generated, and castles/dungeons generated on first entrance, you could have a game that stays interesting and unique for a very long time.

The power up system in Lament of Innocence game is similar to that of other recent Castlevania games. You find little containers that increase health, mana, etc. I’d personally like to see some sort of level-based system, as then it rewards you for actions. I.e., after a while, I got to the point where I never bothered to fight monsters unless the room forced me to (by doing the “lock all doors until all monsters are dead” thing) because there was little reward for doing so. To stop power-leveling, I’d probably track how much exp the player has earned in each area, and top off based on that. So you couldn’t just keep going back and killing the same enemies over and over, but instead had to move on. Figure the average player fights maybe 70% of the enemies in the game and calculate ideal levels and such based on that. Players who find and fight every monster everywhere are rewarded by having a higher average level.

The weapons available are also rather pointless. You have the classic castlevania sub-weapons, which are always cool, but then these orbs that modify them. However, you really don’t have much reason to switch between them very much. The magic system was also limited to a handful of cheesy artifacts you could find. You then had gems which could be used, if you had a particular artifact, for various effects. I’d personally like to see something more like the gba Castlevania games merged with this system. You’d have a variety of spells that enhanced you main weapon(s), sub-weapons, perhaps gems, and the usual personal power ups. Your flame spell could add flame to the whip, a sword, your throwing axe, whatever. Much more intricate and varied.

Speaking of which, a larger variety of weapons would be nice too. Lament of Innocence had 4 armors and 5 whips. You got better armor over time (it becomes available in the store). There are then three optional/bonus whips (elemental powered) and one main upgrade near the end of the game. In a multiplayer game you couldn’t let everyone have the whip (the whip is unique according to the Castlevania story, although I suppose it’s possible more could be made), and since other Castlevania games have indeed had varying weapons (and, in fact, heroes besides the whip-wielding Belmonts) it would be just fine to have swords, axes, polearms, arrows, etc, and let players select the weapons they like best.

All in all, I suppose, I’m as always wanting a mix of a good action game like Castlevania with a great story/exploration game like Baldur’s Gate. I want a long, intriguing, depth-filled, action-packed game with the Castlevania theme. Maybe I should apply to work for Kanomi? ;-)

Still having trouble with the serial ATA stuff. The machine almost always locks during the card initialization (i.e., before grub) after a reboot, but not after a power on. Makes updating kernels over the ‘net damn impossible. I have a BIOS update for the PCI card that I’ll try to apply sometime soonish.

So far as the drive itself, it appears that the libata driver isn’t being used. I tried to disable detection of the drive during bootup (hda=none) so I could load the sata_sil driver afterwards, but on reboot the machine (of course) locked up, so I can’t see how/if that works.

I’m starting to think the best course of action would be to just get a different sata controller. Only, I don’t know which to get. It would have to be a PCI add-on card. Are any such cards made that aren’t Sil3112 based?

Yesterday the 10th was my 21st birthday. The day itself rather sucked, from a combination of work, not feeling well, and having to put up with certain related people I’d rather didn’t exist.

During dinner we ran into what I think was a LUG. Not sure. I found it hilarious though that when I walked into the room and saw these ~10 people spread across the room, the first thing I thought was, “They look like Linux geeks.” That was before I saw any laptops out, heard them speak a single word, etc. I think the guy that gave it away the most was the dude wearing shorts, and hawaiian shirt, and had the Richard Stallman beard/look going on. The rest of the group was a mix between shaggy hacker types, business types, and a couple inbetweens. Sure enough, not 5 minutes later they started babbling on and on about Linux. And at least the few I could hear definitely were people that knew what they were talking about. Although, oddly, all of their laptops were running Windows. I guess next time I go there I’ll have to bring my iBook and show them all what a real computer looks like, eh? ;-)

Now, I over the last few years always tell my parents not to buy me gifts. The eventually badger me into admitting there’s something I want. Last Christmas it was the workout equipment. This birthday it was a new hard-drive. (More on that misadventure later.) So, to say the least, I never get surprised with anything actually decent. Usually just silly “surprise” presents that I really couldn’t care less about.

Around last Christmas I had started thinking about buying a Playstation 2. There are tons of cool games only out on the Playstation systems, and I was missing out. I had planned entirely on buying it on my own. Long before my birthday came around I had totally forgotten even wanting one. Well, last evening I start opening my presents and zing - Playstation 2. First time in a long time I’ve had a nice present that I actually wanted and was totally surprised by. :)

Problem - there’s no room left on our TV to plug the damn thing in. :( Either need to retire some other piece of equipment (Nintendo64 maybe), get the broken big screen TV fixed and put downstairs, or install the PS2 in my bedroom.

The father also got me some more train stuff. A CSX HO-scale engine (very nice, I love the CSX engines, although now that I have 4 he might want to find a different road name to buy ~,^ ) and some CSX road cars. Apparently ones no longer in production and very hard to find. I’ll admit that the cars don’t excite me much, and I probably don’t appreciate the work he went through to get those things, but at least when the trains are running they’ll have a nice looking load to pull, eh?

My order from By The Sword.com came yesterday as well. Wonderful timing, no? ;-) I’m fairly happy with the pants, they’re a lot better than the last pair I ordered (which were the wrong style and thus not long enough), but the shirts I’m not too thrilled with. They look and feel horribly cheap compared to my other LARP shirt. Of course, that shirt was $85, and these two together where $70, so I shouldn’t complain too much.

Now, the hard-drive is really pissing me off. See, for one, Linux doesn’t have that great of SATA support. And of course the braindead backass way the Linux developers fail to support modularity it’s impossible to just install an updated driver. Oh no. You have to rebuild your kernel. And deal with any patches your system might need aside from the updated driver. And so on. Complete pain in the ass, and I’ve still failed to get a working kernel with the other patches I need installed and working.

One big problem is that I asked for a Seagate drive. Seagate is known for its quality. Top notch products. Unfortunately, their serial ATA devices aren’t so great in that they seem to have some kind of firmware bug. Which causes problems in Linux. Linux drivers have a hackish workaround that works by blacklisting certain specific drives and sets their request size down a good deal (can you say “performance hit” ?). Of course, the drive I have is brand new and the current Linux drivers don’t recognize it as one of the broken drives. And agian back to Linux device drivers being a pain in the ass, there’s no way to just add the drive ID, rebuild the driver, and install it. So I’ve gotten a kernel source RPM with the patches I need for the NVIDIA driver (Fedora Core 2), manually modified the source, and am now making another attempt at building a working kernel.

The SATA addon card I got is already rather poorly supported in Linux. It causes huge delays on bootup (already hacked around, though) and otherwise could be contributing to my problems. And those problems are annoying because they’re nothing like anything I can find online. All the other problems I’ve seen with this controller or drive are related to DMA transfers or the like. This problem is just that any file system I create tends not work, error out, and turn read-only, like there’s some kind of weird corruption going on. So I could be going through all this work getting an updated kernel for absolutely no good reason. I hate returning gifts, but I might just end up returning the Seagate drive for an equivalent Maxtor drive, since those are reported to work wonderfully.

I made some release candidates for the AweMUD 0.22 and Scriptix 0.30 releases. I’ve never done a release candidate before, so I’m hoping this’ll work out well. I’ve always berated developers for not using release candidates because, when you don’t, you almost always end up with fairly dumb bugs.

Of course, almost as bad as not using release candidates, misusing release candidates is something else I berate developers for. If you have a release candidate, and someone finds some bugs, you don’t just fix the bugs and make a final release. You fix the bugs, make yet another release candidate, and wait and see if that one has any bugs. Otherwise you end up making new bugs fixing the old ones and those end up in the final release. Not good at all.

It took me a while to figure out (again) how to do the versioning and branching and stuff in Arch. The end result is that it’s incredibly simple. Use the tla make-version command to register a new version of the project/branch, then use the tla tag command to “link” the current patchset of the current version over to the base patchset of the new version. All done. Now I can develop against both versions of the awemud–mainline branch (and for scriptix–mainline too), so I can keep chugging away on new features and stuff in the awemud–mainline–0.23 branch while the awemud–mainline–0.22 sits there waiting for either bug fixes or a release. Very nice.

My previous post on the last LARP event made it seem like the entire event was shite. That’s not true; I actually had a lot of fun. I was just (and still am) pissed about dying.

Every event I go to gives me more stories to tell than I can shake a stick at, and last event was no exception. Perhaps one of my favorite stories to tell is the NPC bandit I played with three others. We spent a lot of time going around town helping out at the various houses, looking for weaknesses and anything we could loot. After maybe an hour and a half of no luck, we started to leave the field. On the way out, a group of people were coming along. Crafty me decides to hold up the last in the line by asking some pointless questions. This man was a tall guy in a cloak who I did not recognize. (But I really wish I had…)

He turns around to point towards a road in answer to one of my questions and I jump on the chance. Out comes my sword and *bop* I smack him in the upper back and call knock out. (This simulates smacking their head to knock them out.) He spins around, call stun maneauver (the skill that lets you counter knock out) and draws his sword. Just having my sure-fire attack fail, and my three companions being cowards, I did what any good bandit would do. Turn and run like all hell. The guy I attacked later told me he had just turned around to yell for help (I had heard him yell “to arms!”) and when he turned back I was already on the edge of sight down the forest trail. Fastest I have *ever* run in my life, no exaggeration.

Anyways, I run behind an abandoned fort down the trail and my companions split off. The guy we attacked and some guards run past the fort looking for us. I circle back out from behind the fort and head down the trail in the opposite direction. Lo and behold, three armed guards. I immediately go into actor mode (hoping this would work) and start acting shaky. I ask the three what the hell had just happened; all I had heard was “to arms!” and took off running. (There were some ogres in town I had run into earlier, I mentioned that I thought perhaps they attacked.) Luckily, the three didn’t themselves know what had happened, so they didn’t realize I was the culprit. They went down the trail their way, I went back the other way.

Now, before re-entering town, I realized that someone there might actually know. So I duck into the forest instead hoping to get out of there alive. Before leaving the field, though, I realize that half the town guard was searching for me, and realized how much more fun everyone would have if they caught the thief. So I turn back around and head for the trail. I see some people on trail and duck behind a tree, but not before they spotted me. Off I ran again, but this time at a much slower pace through the trees and swamp. Eventually I get surrounded and caught.

I’m taken back to one of the forts, the one where the nobles usually stay. One of the guards asked me (quite aggressively) if I had attacked his sergeant. His sergeant is a big burly half ogre type, and I didn’t recall seeing him all day, so I denied his accusations. Then his sergeant comes around the corner. He’s wearing a cloak with the hood down. The cloak is very familiar… “YOU!!!” he bellows, and it dawns on me that yes, I _had_ indeed attacked him. Crap. (I would note that I had recognized him in the cloak, I would have also known he was a half-ogre, and not attacked him. I couldn’t see his face and the yellow paint, and he’s obviously not really 10 feet tall, so I was rather screwed by the limitations of reality. ~_^)

I’m then dragged by him over to see the Duke (I think that was his title) and questioned quite a bit. As the only one of the four who attacked anyone (and that being a member of the Baron’s guard, no less) I was taken outside the fort and had my right hand cut off. Did a rather good job of roleplaying that, I might note. ;-) Of the other three, two were just let go and the other was given employment and even paid a silver right off the bat.

As much as it might seem to suck to be the guy that “lost,” it was a blast. It’s a hell of a lot better when you’re playing an NPC and something bad happens to you because you don’t have emotional attachment to the character. You can just role play out character (and thus give off the impression that you’re emotionally attached, just like anyone else is to theirself) and feel good by making choices that benefits the other players, like intentionally letting yourself get caught for the sake of improving the interaction on field.

I was part of quite a few other encounters on the field as well last event, but that one is perhaps my favorite story of the lot.

Been wondering why I haven’t gotten any mail today at all. INBOX has been devoid of anything new. I tried telneting to my SMTP server from a remote host and everything worked just fine. No errors in the logs, not even any connection attempts.

Finally figured out the problem. I had configured the SPF Proxy (http://spfproxy.com) MX server since there are no easy to install SPF patches for Exim 3, and apparently their server is completely down, and has been for a while. Silly me had set that server as the one and only MX record for my several domains. Whoops.

New setup has my actual SMTP server setup as an MX entry, albeit with a lower priority. So, theoretically, mail servers will now deliver stuff directly here if SPF Proxy is down in the future (or stays down for some time to come).

Meanwhile, I’d really like to get an MTA with native SPF and SRS support. Exim3 is no longer developed against, the Debian unstable packages of Exim4 are either horribly broken or put together by a retarded monkey, and the SRS external utilities in Debian unstable don’t work as all the available online documentation say they should. :(

Memorial Day weekend’s LARP event was rather… unfun. Mostly because I died. Not just “got knocked unconscious yet again” but “fucking dead.” And robbed on top of it. And nobody bothered to cast Life on me in three days, or even try to preserve my body, which means that I’m pretty much screwed in every way imaginable. I don’t think I have the energy or heart to scrap that character and start over again, so if I don’t get ressurected fairly early in the upcoming ten day event, I’m most likely just going to quit. :(