Well, since within the last week or two I’ve taken up RF online, played with Dofus, and started fooling around with Puzzle Pirates again (I pump a mean bilge), I figured one more game wouldn’t hurt. So, I downloaded ROSE Online. It’s by Gravity, the folks who produced Ragnarok Online - and judging from the patch notes, they’re already having the same sorts of problems as RO. 
It plays like any other traditional Japanese/Korean MMORPG, click to move, F1-F8 to use skills that you slide into bar, bad translation, decently cute graphics, etc… But I’m not writing a review. Ok, fine, quick review… umm… I give it a 6 out of 10. No justifications right now, maybe if you ask nice I’ll give my reasons. It just fails to wow me so far.
What I am doing is recording my first experience dealing with the natives.
Begin tale of woe and silliness now:
I had just barely found my way to the second town in the game (three quests leading me there, I figured it was about time). Upon leaving town to slaughter innocent honey bees in order to join the soldier class, I encountered (was followed by) a female character.
I ignore her and proceed to attack the nearest bug. She walks up next to me and watches me fight. Halfway through the battle, she begins to systematically strip herself of all clothing. Naked ROSE chars wear underwear of the flowing temple toga school of high couture.
I continue to ignore her and start off toward my next mob when she begins to speak.
girl: hi
me: ?
My ignoring resumes after a few seconds, and I run off to kill something else. She follows me.
girl: never seen a girl like me before?
me: you mean a 14-year-old boy?
I run off again, she follows. I find a bug, start killing it.
girl: whos 14
me: that would be you 
girl: i am not 14
me: suuure you’re not
Bug dies, I continue to my next one, and she continues to follow me. While I’m fighting the next bee, she gets dressed again and helps me finish the kill.
girl: i’m 22!
me: right. you go ahead and be 22 then
I run off yet one more time, this time she doesn’t follow me.
somebody else: i’m 18!
Yay for free games…
Posted by Ammon as games, mmorpg, play, rose online at 11:18 AM EST
2 Comments »
http://dofus.com/en
Yesterday, a coworker encountered Dofus, a tactical mmorpg done in flash. It’s very close to the sort of game I’ve always wanted to write - with numerous little stylistic differences of course.
Oh, and it’s free. Well, there’s apparently some sort of subscription option, but I can’t find any solid documentation on what subscribing actually earns you. The game is entirely playable with a free account from what I can tell.
As is traditional for this sort of pricing scheme, it is only natural that the game was produced by some random Japanese company I’ve never heard of before. The English client looks like it was actually originally developed in French - there are still random untranslated phrases in places and there are 3 French servers to 1 English.
Since it was written in flash 7, it should work on any modern operating system. They offer downloads for Windows, Linux, and Mac (OS9/X). Solaris (sparc and x86) also has a port of flash 7, so it might be possible to run the “linux” release of the client on there. I’ve not tested this theory yet since I haven’t had access to a Sun since I quit at ECE. Come to think of it, I’ve not actually tested on a linux box yet either I’ll probably fire it up on Hedwig tonight.
Also, a bit of warning. Since this is such a big program and it’s done in Flash, it abides by Flash’s security rules - which are annoying. The absolute first time you run the program on a computer might be kind of problematic. You’ll have to agree to letting it write stuff on your hard drive - and sometimes there are issues with full screen animation loading at the same time as that dialog, etc…
As is also traditional for this sort of game (small asian mmo’s on the optional pay scheme), the documentation is poor - or at least poorly translated. There is a good bit of information available, and the in-game tooltips and stuff are something amazing when you consider how bad/nonexistant they could have been.
The art on the web page is tremendous (as tradition also mandates :P). It feels a whole lot like the Nippon Ichi games (Disgaea, etc…) or Ragnarok Online. Unfortunately, the actual in-game graphics are of lower quality.
This reduced graphic quality is entirely understandable - we’re operating in Flash, not in some sort of 3D accelerated environment or anything. We have nice anti-aliased vector graphics, but it’s still 2D. The characters are really quite tiny in-game, and lose a whole lot of the definition that you can see in the full-sized images.
Most room backgrounds inside of town are just flat pre-rendered bitmaps… scaled up to whatever resolution you’re running in. So they actually look kind of tacky if you stare at them long enough while scaled to a high enough resolution (like 1280×1024). This is kind of funny. Most games that I’m aware of that mix these kinds of images do it the other way around - render a nice pretty background in real-time and place pre-rendered sprites on top. Shrug.
The music didn’t wow me, at least, I can’t remember enough about it to have any impression one way or the other.
Latency is a big issue. Flash was never really meant to do real-time communications with a remote server. Especially not one that a few hundred other folks are hammering at the same time. I mean… it can open sockets… but you have to transfer data in XML, which means extra data to transfer, which means more packets to achieve the same goal. (In fact, the API docs for the XMLSocket class seem vaguely of the opinion that nobody should ever use the class for anything, ever ;P)
Andd the latency isn’t just the network’s fault either. Since this is such a big Flash app (50mb) with so many things going on at once (I’ve seen 20+ players running around the same room plenty of times), it will lag all but the stoutest of machines. My 2.4ghz P4 laptop feels noticeably slower when running the game. My AMD64 3200+ at home is a bit better, but not much.
But it’s not just Flash’s fault. It’s the nature of the game. It needs to forcibly pause and delay you because this is a multi-user turn-based environment. So… you have timers and countdowns that you can’t really avoid. You can sometimes click through to speed things up a touch, but not by much.
On the other hand, because your moves in combat are timed, it means you might wind up missing turns if you’re not paying active attention or if you think for too long So it’s not like Adventure Quest where you can kill stuff slowly over the course of a long work day.
So far, I’ve played a few hours with two characters, an archer and a healer fairy type. My only real recommendation about starting the game so far is to go through the tutorial. It takes a while, but is actually pretty good. It’s quite easy to miss this prompt as your first few moments in the game are vaguely confusing. The following things will happen:
- The game will load. You will not be able to do anything.
- An NPC will walk up to you and start talking. Giving some sort of long-winded message about world theme and stuff.
- Click on the Eagle, Ganymede to start the tutorial. Click on the big statue to jump right into the game.
Aside from the fact that the game is so confusing at the beginning, I recommend the tutorial for some fairly twinkish reasons. First, you’ll get a free piece of equipment out of it, an amulet that gives you +1 to damage. But that’s boring.
The really fun bit of the tutorial is that there’s something of a bug/exploit/wierdly intentional situation at the end of the combat portion of the tutorial. You are put into a situation where you’re able to repeat a very easy fight against a mob that’s worth enough xp to get you to level 2 in one kill - level 3 in a few more, and level 4 a few more after that… Oh, and you’re healed to full right after the fight. I leveled my archer to 5 in about 20 minutes of repeatedly killing the little spider. Level 4 to 5 took most of that time - even though she was one-shotting him by then. I am guessing that it might be possible to get up to level 6 or even 7 this way, but that’s probably not worth the trouble.
Get up to level 3 (or 4 if you have any patience at all) before continuing the tutorial. You can’t go back a step, so once you leave the room, you won’t be able to grind against the mob any more.
All in all, I am enjoying the game so far.
The tactical element of combat is brutal. The NPC’s that I’ve fought so far have different AI’s and they can trap you in melee with them (which is not good for wimpy healer type). There seem to be a whole range of options in combat, I like it.
I’ve been in a few multi-player battles so far and they worked out well enough. I’d like to see what it’s like to be in an actual party before passing my final judgement, but I think the game’s worth checking out if you have the time/inclination.
Posted by Ammon as dofus, eat, flash, games, mmorpg at 1:47 PM EST
No Comments »
Last night, I was running around on RF Online, enjoying Rincewind’s “new” video card when the machine died on me again. All attempts at resurrection have bombed. I am expecting that I need to
Now, Rincewind has this habit. Every few months, he crashes catastrophically. He’s uncontested in the race for my most expensive computer ever.
My initial cost was something like $1,400 but after hardware failures during the first week (which waranties I was not able to redeem because the seller was based in Manhattan), my total cost to get the machine running was closer to $1,700. And those are 2001 dollars, back when I was earning $7/hr as a care provider for disabled folks.
Hedwig by comparrison was something just under $1,000 to get running if I remember correctly. Replacement parts over the last few years have only added up to $100 or $200 total.
Anyhow. Rincewind has acquired a new motherboard ($75) since then. And a new hard drive (300gb, 7200rpm, $150). And more ram (a gig, $100). And a better video card (radeon 9200, 128mb, $100) which I just replaced ($100). Total pricetag so far? $2,225 if my estimates are adding up correctly.
And that’s for a machine with a 1.4ghz processor. I’ve finally capped the AGP slot’s capacity with monday’s upgrade. The mobo can handle an Athlon XP 3200+ and up to 4 gigs of DDR400 ram… But a new processor to cap out the machine’s speed would run me $185 at Newegg right now and the memory would run $260 minimum for name brand stuff…
For the money I’ve spent on Rincewind so far, I could have built an Alienware… sigh.
Anyhow. We’re hoping that it’s hard drive issues (which the machine’s been plagued with in the past) and not the new video card that caused the problem. I’ll swap out drives and reinstall windows tonight to see what happens.
Posted by Ammon as eat, personal at 9:12 AM EST
No Comments »
Ok, I’m all but done with my little break from the mud. Pre-req’s for my resuming work on the game:
- The game & associated web page must be running off of Esme. A’tuin is fired.
Yup. Long list. I’ve compiled the latest driver on Esme already and am copying the lib dir over right now. Whenever that’s copied, I’ll hammer on it until the game runs - at which point I’ll prolly make a cleaner copy (shut down game and forums for a bit in order to guarantee a clean shift).
So, hopefully very soon not only will Walraven be back in active production… it will be in production on a much sturdier machine. Yay!
update
Well, it’s the 22nd and I’ve still not finished migrating the mud… typical. Worst case scenareo is that we make it happen on the 28th - when Acius arrives in town for a week
Posted by Ammon as mud, play at 8:57 AM EST
No Comments »
Quick little annoyance that I need to gripe about.
I’m prone to beta testing software, since, well… that’s what I do. As such, I’ve been running the IE7 beta ever since it launched and am using it right now to post this. I am impressed with the thoroughness with which Microsoft has stolen features from Firefox and Opera and I am happy that they finally offer decent PNG and CSS support (hooray for 10-year-old technologies).
It generally appears to have been a well thought out product - at least, it becomes a usable browser when compared to IE6. And they have absolutely no excuse not to have produced something just astronomically better than IE6. After all, it’s been 5 years since they released a feature upgrade in their browser - which curiously accompanied all of the anti-trust fun.
That said, I’m expecting that they’ll experience something like tremendous backlash when they start pushing the browser on unsuspecting lusers. The menu layout is borderline arcane. I’m looking as hard as I can, and cannot manage to find anything resembling a “File -> Open” menu option. Ok, I lied. By navigating to “Tools -> Toolbars -> Classic Menu”, I was able to toggle this back on (don’t remember if it is disabled by default or not).
So… I select Open because I want to open a locally stored file - jpeg comp of a site I’m working on. Since I have IE open for testing anyways, and since it offers tabbed browsing and all… I navigate to the directory in question and have to change the file type in the little box to jpeg (by default, they were displaying only html files in the dialog). The file becomes selectable and I tell it to open.
Which it does.
In GIMP.
Now, had I double-clicked on the icon in Windows Explorer, I would have expected to fire up GIMP. But I specifically told Internet Explorer to load the file… Of course, Microsoft swears up and down that they’re separate products, and that your computer can function w/o IE…
URGH!
Upon further investigation (in IE6), it appears that this is IE’s native behavior - that it refuses to display an image unless it is loaded from an html page. Using the open dialog in IE6 on another machine, we got the picture in question to load in the Windows Picture Viewer Thing.
Posted by Ammon as eat, internet explorer, rant at 12:03 PM EST
No Comments »
