5 years ago while in college I worked at the montrose BK in the winter and everyone there looked more normal compared to the other. The bizarre thing is however that they are both owned by the same guy. We at the montrose store used to poke fun at the sketchy criminally staffed lane store all the time. I was even at one point during my last month of work there 4.5 years ago sent there to work the night shift a couple times a week and once I told the manager on duty to send me home before i fsckin kill one of these morons.

I was sent home and the manager apologized to me.

What set this off? Well as two of the sketchy dirt bags were goofing off it took them 15 minutes to make a whopper somehow and I asked them what the hell they were doing. They replied “What whopper?”. I threw the bag with the receipt on it at them and said “That one”.

Anyways back to the original point. I love BK, the one closest to me is sketchy so I put up with it but what brought it to mind was this kid on cash yesterday who looked like he was addicted to crack, had about 3 or 4 attempted tatoos and looked confused when I seemed to want to order food. When I managed the pizza hut across the road we didn’t have any cracked out people… Whatever. I’m moving in a week, hopefully the St kittysburg BK isn’t as sketchy.

However!

Twice I have been on the bus in the last 2 weeks and some knob doesn’t move once the bus vacates and keeps crowding me into my seat. there are other spaces! Go away! The first time I eventually asked them to allow me out at a stop and I moved. This second time which was yesterday the person doesn’t leave but on top of not leaving they put their bag onto the seat on the other side then eventually put their leg up on it across the aisle.

I made a point to take the middle arm rest and huffed every so often and inside my mind was going “GO AWAY. LEAVE. WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE”

So remember, when you are doubled up on a bus and you are on the outside seat have the courtesy to move when a seat becomes available.

WSYE Pocket Cloud is an application for iOS which doubles as a generic RDP client and also as a VMware View Client. My personal interest in the application is for the latter as I have a View environment for work and being able to connect to it from any device on the go is quite convenient. This application used to sell for a hefty $49.99 on the app store but recently it has been on sale for $15.99 so I had to take the opportunity to purchase it before the price goes back up. Now on my iPod touch this is a wee bit impractical but my intention is to eventually have an iPad and on that device this is a very effective remote desktop tool so taking advantage of the purchase now was worth while.

What I like:

• Doubles as View client and a basic RDP client so I can connect to my work environment and other windows systems
• When connecting to a view environment it automatically asks for my RSA secureID so I don’t have to keep logging into VPN on my iPod
• Supports a staticmouse that you can drag around for better drag/drop and copy paste can be much more helpful that other clients which usually just have touch mouse interaction
• Zoom in/out support, the x can be a bitch to hit sometimes

Dislike:

• No PCoIP, RDP is great and all but PCoIP is far superior in terms of speed and bandwidth

If you use VMware View or if you just need a very good RDP client take advantage of the sale while it lasts this is a very stable and robust application.

My apologies for the poor cellphone camera quality.

Current Album: 2010
Images:

Vendetta online as far back as it has existed has always had pirates, traders and anti pirates. Always, even pre release there was the VPR guild and there were pirates hunting players in the alpha but the game really doesn’t offer any missions of either side (except trading of course) so I decided to create some.

Essentially the basic gist of this mission is you have a crappy courier mission (Special Delivery) and an unaligned person asks you to detour on your delivery, if you do you get whisked into a world of piracy (Difficult Choices) but whether you let it consume you or whether at the last moment you realize what you are doing and change your mind is up to you in the end.

I chose to do this because as far as grey space goes an all the interesting things that go on in it it really has no official mention in the game (except a “look out n00bs itz dangerous!!!” in the tutorials). I went out of my way not to name guilds or people (because those change frequently) but to cover some very basic ideas of anti rat and rat behaviour. If you decide to be evil it will go on about how you have a great life plundering and pillaging the weak ahead, if you change your mind and turn against your former pirate allies it mentions that there are others who feel as you do in regards to rats and you should seek them out. If you are the pinnacle of boring and for some reason just take the first mission over and over and over again eventually it’s like “oh, you make a good trader, carry on”. 3 choices, 3 endings. I have also set accomplishments at the end of each spur so in the future specific anti rat/rat/trading missions based off this tree can occur.

The mission is first presented as Special Delivery in nation space. If you decide to go down the rabbit hole the rest of the missions play out as Difficult Choices in Corvus stations. Enjoy

Counter strike, the mission to end all missions.

What drives me to make missions? I want to play combat missions that stress the fuck out of you as you scramble to try and complete them barely scraping by successfully or being beaten down to hell by what seems impossible odds. Nothing in VO really offered that nor really does to this date (except a mission or 2 I have in game of course). I designed a story 2 years ago for the Itani to accomplish this. The basic jist of the story is the Serco are trying to sneak in the back door through Jallik bypassing Deneb to attack Itani and you must fight them off. After fighting them off you get promoted to a training position in the capital but tragedy strikes as your trainees are killed by a Queen and you vow to seek revenge. Impressed by your revenge ass kicking you get assigned to the Counter strike fleet in the Ukari and Helios system with the goal of keeping the Serco bottled up to their own affairs however the Serco do not care for this plan and fight back….

Sounds simple? it could have been, my previous missions break each story line into 4 separate missions with the 4th usually being the climax to the story but I decided the envelope needs to be pushed and VO’s mission engine stretched as far as it can fucking go.

The Super mission concept

Other MMO’s have these massive missions that take you extended amounts of time they usually call them Quests or dungeons or whatever but VO did not have anything like this. Missions are generally short and to the point with a little bit of substance here and there so I decided the entire Counter strike story would be contained within 1 mission.

Stations as your base are boring…

Secondly I decided your base would be a trident frigate instead of a station. You would be required to dock to get missions, repair, and so forth. There was a cheat event “dock any station” and if you require the player to stay in that sector you can effectively use the capital ship as a docking event yay!

Keeping it simple

Ever read Taggarts tactics in the Claw Marks magazine from the TCS Tigers Claw? Have any idea what I just said at all? Well basically Missions can be classified into a few basic types of Patrol, escort, defend and strike. These are the formats for the internal sub missions of the game. In total there are about 10 sub missions contained within this one missions and I would say average play time is probably around 1.5 hours depending how fast you are at the sub missions.

Careful design

I had to make sure when I built this mission that I was mindful to clean up NPC’s after each sub mission otherwise this mission would crush the servers resources. Usually with a jump out or mission change or when the player was out of site a simple go away (warp out) would suffice. I learned from Other side of the universe 4 that this was important because that mission 2 years ago used to crash the test server so being mindful of your resources is very important! To give you an idea of the scale of Counter strike it is currently 60 stages using 10 sector destinations, 9 timers, 27 individual npcs and 36 npc groups. Lots of stuff. More than anything currently in existence made by a player.

NPC choreography

To make sure everything happens how you want it in a twitch based game can be pretty difficult because you cannot predict the skill of the player and forcing things to blow up on their own is lame. For events where you are supposed to lose I usually make use of a timer that keeps re spawning the enemy or friendlies in a x minute interval until the desired scripted event is achieved. Also, despite your beliefs from the border war, Capital ships can destroy each other!!! Maybe the devs should play my missions and take tips?

Testing

This is the hard part, getting people to test in the first place is a huge challenge but in a mission of this scope if any massive bugs were to be found they could unravel any stage jumping set up and require hours of work. Currently the only other player besides me to play this is mr_spuck and he seemed to quite enjoy the mission. I sat back and watched him play the mission and took some screens which I have linked below. Keep in mind when I am developing I turn all the fanciness off and run in an 800×600 window.

Stay tuned, this one is Coming Soon!

Current Album: Vendetta Online: Counter strike
Images:

Over a month ago Guild software made some announcements that got the attention of Slashdot and a few other high profile sites which attracted an influx of new players. I happened to notice they all seemed to run into the same issue between lvl 2-3 which was an immediate halt of anything interesting and a terrible grind with the basic and advanced combat missions in order to make level 3. Level 3 being key here as that opens up access to trading guild, escort missions, hive skirmish and the border wars all of which can be very amusing. This lead me to the drawing board to try and correct this long standing issue.

The Gauntlet

The idea behind this mission is you go to a specified sector and fight waves and waves of enemy ships of progressing difficulty and getting larger rewards as you reach certain gates or round completions. This is similar to how adv combat works EXCEPT I use a variety of ships in progressing difficulty until an ending conclusion of a boss battle that ends with a bonus and cash reward whereas ADV Combat just tells you to go find and kill bots until you don’t feel like it anymore and it’s always the same over and over and over and over again! Plus ADV combats rewards are shit. If you have ever played the game Wing Commander: Academy you will immediately recognize the format of Rounds and waves because that is pretty much the direct inspiration for this mission. For anyone who might read this and want to check them out this mission is available for lvl2-4 combat in barracks stations it has a replay limit of 3 times per day. You may ask why it is limited and that reason is because I don’t want people to just play this one over and over and over without checking out other missions available either otherwise the whole point was lost in creating it.

Help! Rogue Queen detected

This mission was inspired during the newb influx by the amount of new players requesting help with Queens and also by seeing veteran players taking newb players out Queen hunting. The basic idea is that there has been a rogue Queen detected and the station is hiring the player to help destroy its escorts so a ready wing of Bombers can swoop in and destroy it. The point is to show the new player that coordinated efforts result in easier victory and also to introduce the player to the Hive Queens in the event no one else does. This mission is available at barracks stations immediately and goes away once the player exceeds combat 5. There is also a 3 play per day limit attached to this mission to avoid overplaying it.

This is all very newb oriented content and for that I do apologize to the more seasoned players for leaving you out this time but I have something coming down the pipes either this week or next week that is for higher levels players so stay tuned.

Not to worry though, the community has lived on strong over the last 10 years and many fan games have come and gone to continue the story, my favourite being Wing Commander: Standoff. The reason it is my favourite because it has truly captured the absolute intensity and madness of the first 2 games of the series.

Recently I have been giving back to the legacy of the game with the creation of my Wing Commander music plugin for Vendetta online which overlays Wing Commander 1/2 music into the game. Along with that I have remixed a copy of the Kilrathi theme in Garage band giving it a different sound and I located a PDF version of the SegaCD version of the manual. It has been a good Wing Commander year for me

But wait there’s more…

I have been trying to expand my collection of the series which until this year consisted of Wing Commander III, IV and Privateer. About a month ago I found on ebay an auction for Wing Commander II: Deluxe edition and I jumped on it. Upon Arrival I noticed it came with the ORIGINAL manual which had all the fighter/ship specs PLUS a 10 page sample from the book Freedom Flight. This was absolute gold for me and set me off on my next task: Finding Wing Commander 1.

A few weeks past and I found a set of Wing Commander 1 with the original fighter specs however after some heavy bidding I lost it to someone else and felt rather defeated. I took one more pass at ebay and found a “Buy it now” of Wing Commander deluxe edition IN THE ORIGINAL BOX with FIGHTER SPECS, CLAWMARKS, WC1, Secret missions 1 and 2 plus the install manuals, a 1990 catalog and some other paperwork from Origin! I jumped on that quickly and awaited shipping.

Today it has arrived and it is Christmas in June for me! The box has a dent in it but all the contents are in excellent condition. For being almost 20 years old I would say it has held up pretty damn well and I look forward to liberating the Vega Sector, chasing down the Sivar and liberating Firekka from Kilrathi Occupation!

Yesterday she calls in for the second time to try and bug them into giving her an iPhone and the agent on the other end goes”Why don’t you just wait a couple months for the new iPhone, it has tons of new features”

?!

Well fuck, Gizmodo and that poor engineer are under all that stress from the full might of Apples secrecy engine and all we really needed to do was pump Rogers for information.