4
Jun
2011
Rift – One Step Closer to Guild Wars 2
So there Trion finally came out with a 7 day trial of Rift last month. I gave that whirl and ended up buying it after 3 days. It is one step farther from the old MMO and one step closer to Guild Wars 2′s questless system. I still employs a full range of quests, but many of them are outleveled because of the rift system.
The invasion system is almost like the GW2 system but without much of the longer term effects. A zone is invaded with many rifts and invasion forces at once and you have to group up to complete a goal and then defeat a boss. Which is basically one of two major factors that differentiate Rift from other contemporary MMOs.
I love these invasions. The problem is that it still seems like the side part of the game. During most of the game I’m still doing lame “kill 15 squirrel quests” which is exactly the part of WoW that drives me to rush through it all and try to hit the end game.
What Guild Wars 1 did best was having a series of chained plot quests that got you through the game. There was a little gear progression after that in certain dungeons and some higher level dungeons but in general you level did not determine your progression, the plot did. It was not a matter of being a certain level to progress, it was a matter of doing certain plot missions to progress, like you do in most single player RPGs. Of course you could still run ahead and skip bits, but the natural progression was that you completed missions and did plot quests to ‘beat the game’.
Guild Wars is the still the only MMO I’ve played where I’m not looking at an experience bar but just playing the game.
1
May
2010
PS3, S/PDIF output to computer
Recently posted this on a forum but I figured this might be a good place as well:
Goal:
5.1 output from my PS3 through my computer.
Why? I don’t have any other way to output to 5.1 from it without spending money (receiver + different speakers).What I have:
First gen PS3, HDMI and TOSLINK cables.Monitor has HDMI -> analog stereo output
Problems: Constant low hum (monitor has bad quality output) and only 2.0 sound. This requires the monitor to be on HDMI output to passthrough audio as well.This motherboard. It has a Realtek ALC888 chip. I also have the separate bracket for TOSLINK in.
Problems: This can do stereo but no DTS/Dolby, but it fixes the buzzing problem. It can also play when the monitor is on different output.And a Creative X-Fi Extreme Audio card.
This has S/PDIF in, but I am not spending $100+ on the options they have to actually use it. Instead I am trying repin the gigabyte bracket and have it connect to this card. It does have DTS/Dolby decoding :DSo, the gigabyte manual says that the bracket has three pins.
1. red – Power
2. yellow – SPDIF_I
3. black – GNDSo I switched black and yellow to match up with this pinout diagram of the creative card (top left, +5V, GRN, SPDIF0 IN)
Plugged that in and… nothing. I can hear feint popping when I switch audio output devices on the PS3, but the Creative card never shows a signal (“Unknown or invalid signal”, just like when disconnected).
Any help or insight would be appreciated, thanks.
P.S. I think I may have destroyed any input on my sound card by fooling around with this. My microphone no longer works on that sound card :(
20
Nov
2009
Add This to the Bookshelf
I bought a few new books. Or at least it started as just a few new books. I wanted to catch up on classic sci-fi books that I had never read. And then it turned into some classic fantasy as well. And then a few classic cyberpunk books. And after that I had to get some random fantasy to try out something new. And then a few classic books. Oh and a graphic novel.
7
Sep
2009
Patch Tuesday
I just wanted to mention something that a lot of people don’t know about, Patch Tuesday. That would be that scheduled Microsoft patched are sent out the second Tuesday of every month. The only exception is that critical patches become available as soon as possible.
Why does this matter? Well if you don’t want to run automatic updates you can make a note of the second Tuesday of every and just run Windows Update then instead of always having a background process.