PoE Characters

So, this post won't be to everyone's taste, but I've been really enjoying this game, so here are some of the passive skill trees for several of my characters.

Dual Totem Witch

Ice Spear Crit Shadow (Died in Nemisis when I panicked facing a Storm Herald)

A Dual wielding Duelist, my 1st Character

1 Handed Spectral Throw Scion

A Templar who can't decide between magic and melee.

Hexmaster Witch

Summoner Witch

Generic beat on people with heavy object Maurader, 1st character with which I beat Dominus

Switching over to My New Computer

I decided the best way to make sure I had everything I needed loaded onto my new computer was to move it over to the main computer desk and actually start using it as my primary machine.  I've learned and/or remembered a few things, line you can't watch videos on YouTube without a flash player installed and that I have a speaker wire and a microphone wire plugged into the audio panel on the back of the computer, not two speaker wires.

One of the other things I was doing was setting up my browser the way I liked it, which included a quick link to my blog.  Hence this quick post.

I've been a bad blogger

It's been over a year since I posted to this blog.  I've done things this year, vacationed in Fort Lauderdale and California.  I've had some good chess tournaments.  I went to Gen Con for the first time and loved it.  I just haven't blogged about any of this.

I'm planning on building a new computer running Windows 7 since my old XP machine is going out of support next year, and I really want nothing to do with Windows 8.  Maybe I'll blog in depth about that.

But for now, just a short blog post.

Regan's Brithday

I think everyone had a good time at Regan's birthday party this last weekend.  It was the first time Caroline had been in the states for a family party since starting grad school.  The main reason I'm making this post is that it doesn't seem to be possible to upload animated GIF images to Facebook.  Here's one of Taylor dancing a jig.

Here's another animation of Abby (a.k.a. Sophie) going down the slide.

Diablo 1 vs Diablo 3

So, I played a little bit of the original Diablo this weekend.  This is after playing well over 120 hours of Diablo 3. (D3 from this point on.)  By any stretch of the imagination, I've gotten my money's worth out of D3.  Even if you just counted the time my nephew Blake has played a character on my account, it wouldn't be a wasted purchase.

Also, there is a lot of venom directed at Blizard about how D3 didn't live up to either of the previous games. I can only talk about the original Diablo (D1) because I never played Diablo 2 (D2).  As a game, I don't think there can be any doubt.  D3 has the better gameplay than D1.  The previous games have pixelated graphics and clunky animation.  The action is also very slow, almost painfully slow, in the original game.

However, I also think I know what is missing from D3.  I have no sense of exploration in D3.  The levels seem bland and force me through them in a very linear matter.  In D1, the staircase down to the 2nd level of the cathedral puts you very near the stairs that lead down to level 3.  You are no where near ready to go to level 3 when you find those stairs, and if you go down them, it's going to take a bit of luck to make it back up them.  I like that sort of game design better than always fighting monsters that are "just right" for your level of experience.  It gives you a sense of accomplishment when you can tackle an area that quickly forced you to flee or reload a saved game the first time you set foot within it.

Even in the camps, I don't feel like there is any sense of exploring the town.  There is only one path that gets you from one end of town to the other, and if you follow it, you'll see everything and everybody there is to see in town.  I decided to wander, and there was a kid selling black market items, but he charged you just to take a look.  I didn't have much cash, so I decided not to even see what he had to offer.  I also had found some magic staves that took up more than half my inventory space.  I wanted to keep the staff of healing, but sell the other two.  However, the blacksmith wouldn't buy them.  I had to wander to the outskirts of town, where I found the witch Adria (Who also plays a large role in D3, to say anything else would provide spoilers.)  I was able to sell the staves, and upgrade my weapons and armor a bit.  In D3, the merchants will buy just about anything I might care to sell, but they don't pay enough money to make that even remotely worthwhile.  If it weren't for the crafting system in D3, it would be more effecient to just toss items you weren't going to use on the ground than to go through the trouble of taking them back to town.

Another game design element that I didn't really care for now that I've compared old and new side by side was all the mini-quests that string together to make sure you always know you're making progress along the main story line.  In D1, I need to kill the butcher, and I know he's somewhere inside the cathedral, but you're not really sure how far down into the depths of the old cathedral you'll find him.  However, the internet is far more prevalent than it was when D1 was release, and at the slightest bit of confusion, players would have been ducking out of D3 to check an online player's guide.

I feel like I'm rambling on a bit, so I guess I need to wrap this blog post up.  I think what I'll finish up with is my impression that while the gameplay of D3 is far superior to that of D1, that there were some real misses in terms of game design around linearity and difficulty.  However, what was really lost between D1 and D3 is the atmosphere of the game.  Playing old D1 again, I really felt like I was exploring a town that had come under assault and a creepy old church.  In D3 the atmosphere of the old cathedral and Leoric's manner are good.  However, in the rest of the game, the atmosphere leaves a lot to be desired and the different areas feel like a very generic implementation of level design.  Even though the gameplay is light years improved in D3 comparred to D1, I can't ever shake the feeling that I'm playing a game in D3 like I could in D1.  The antiquated graphics and speed of D1 would eventually remind me that I was playing a game, but I always know I'm playing a game in D3.  I fun game to be sure.  One I'm going to play after I post this blog entry, but not a game that immerses me in the game world.

Unexpected development

I came home last night to find a downed tree limb in my driveway.  Other than my roses, I don't think any damage was done.  I wasn't at home, otherwise, this would have wiped out my car!  Here are some images.

This was a picture I took last night when I got home.  I thought it was a pretty good picture at the time, but I've got better now that the sun is up.

 Here's a shot of the end of the limb hitting the porch.  It looks like it just barely missed the house.

 Even with my 18-55 zoom set to 18mm for maximum field of view, I had to go to the edge of my yard to get the whole limb in the frame.

 Here's one of the damaged tree.

And here's a look at my driveway from the back of the house.

I certainly wasn't expecting this when I came home from pool last night.

Problem Solving

So, when you come up against a problem you don't know how to solve, how much background information do you need to be confident that you can locate and understand the information needed to actually solve the problem?  I'm going to use installing a SATA hard drive into one of my computers as a case in point.

I actually physically mounted the drive a few days ago, but I had forgotten what a SATA power cable looks like and consequently installed a drive without plugging it in.  This morning I opened the case back up and attached the power cable.  However, still no luck with the computer recognizing the drive.  After reseating the cables and trying the other SATA connector on the computer's motherboard, I started looking at the OS level (Ubuntu Linux) for reasons why my drive wouldn't be recognized.

After looking at a few different forums, I saw that someone had said something about telling the BIOS to enable SATA support.  So I rebooted the computer and went into the BIOS setup.  Now, anyone reading this far is either saying SATA, BIOS, what are all these acronyms?  Or they already know without me having to explain.  So that's probably one level of knowledge that was needed to even attempt to solve this problem.  However, going into the BIOS, I didn't see anything useful which led me to search for the manual for my motherboard on the internet.

I'm not sure if it amazing or predictable the number of computer component manuals that can be found on the internet.  It's probably a cost saving measure for manufactures to some degree.  Anyway, I'm reading along when I notice that my motherboard only supports SATA up to 1.5GHz when I installed a 3.0 GHz drive, maybe that's the problem.

So I do a little more internet research which indicates that things still should just work even if the drive can pump out data faster than the motherboard can read it.  Good, no messing with jumper settings.  So that was another thing I didn't know when I started trying to make my drive work, but it was a potential wild goose chase.  Thankfully I recognized it as such before I started going through my boxes of random computer components looking for a jumper I no longer needed.

Back to the manual, I find the section I needed, finally, in the On Chip ATA menu, you have to set it so that both PATA (a.k.a IDE) and SATA are both supported at the same time.  So there's another level of knowledge needed.  I had been in the BIOS and looked at all the settings I could potentially change, but that one didn't jump out at me as the one I needed to change.  Maybe it should have, after all, ATA is very similar to SATA in name.  However, since it didn't, it was back to the manual for me.  (And why the %*&! isn't this the default setting?  The motherboard should be set to detect everything it could possibly support unless you tell it you aren't running a specific type of device.)

Back to problem solving, the ultimate issue wasn't what I expected it to be, it wasn't even the 2nd thing I looked at.  On top of that, I didn't recognize the actual solution until I got more information by reading the manual.  It also took a fair amount of time.  I started baking a loaf of cornbread when I realized that it wasn't just a matter of poorly seated cables, and I heard the timer going off just as I was saving the BIOS settings to turn on support for both PATA and SATA at the same time, which was 40 minutes.  However, I never really thought I wouldn't be able to get the drive working.  I was sure I knew enough to find the solution.

I'm sure having assembled 3 computers from parts was a big part of why I felt confident I could get the new drive working, but other than checking the cables that wasn't what got the drive working.  Check the cables, see if someone else had the same problem, RTFM is a pretty basic set of troubleshooting steps., but I don't think that would have been enough without a 20 year background in working on and with PCs.  What makes me keep thinking about this is that there isn't one specific thing I could point to which would be the key piece of information I needed.