Pomimo, że pracy sporo, a czasu mało, to nie mogłem się powstrzymać… NetBeans 6.5 wydane! Najnowszą wersję mojego ulubionego IDE można pobrać z licznych mirrorów, a dostępnych jest kilka dystrybucji.

Jestem o tyle zadowolony, że pominąłem aktualizację do wersji 6.1, w której PHP było dostępne tylko jako osobny bundle. W związku z tym bardzo podskoczy mi też prędkość.

Radość moja tak wielką jest, gdyż PHP natywnie przez tą wersje jest wspierane. CSS się koloruje nie tylko kiedy nawias pominę ale też gdy dosplay zamiast display napiszę.

Po tej dozie patosu dodam jeszcze, że powyższe uzupełnić należy przez poniższe:

• Ulepszony debugger dla JavaScriptu (również dla FF i IE)
• Manager bibliotek JS (jQuery, Prototype. itp.)
• Debugowanie z użyciem Xdebug
• Generator MySQLowych baz z użyciem snippetów
• Edytory PHP, CSS i JS są jeszcze lepsze (pewnie już nie kolorują jako błędu endif)
• I wiele, wiele innych, których nie mam czasu wymienić

Do wersji podstawowej nie jest dołączone, ale można pobrać w ramach pluginów, lub jako osobną wersję (pewnie mocno zarobaczywioną, tak jak to było w przypadku podobnego wydania dla PHP) Early Access for Python.

Nie wymieniałem tutaj zmian dla Javy, bo się na niej nie znam, a i NetBeansów do Javy nie używam, ale zapewne i dla niej jest sporo nowości.

Dla bardziej dociekliwych polecam prezentację nowej wersji.

From the Chromium Developer Documentation:

Dev Channel: Early Access to Features and Fixes

Google Chrome publishes new releases to the Dev channel frequently. The Dev channel gives the community access to upcoming features, features in development, and the latest bug fixes. We can use feedback from Dev channel users to improve and iterate on feature ideas, and make sure that the latest features work properly before we release them to a wider audience.

The Dev channel is useful for:

• Web developers who want to test their sites or scripts with pre-release versions of Google Chrome
• Testers who need to make sure they’re working with the latest bug fixes
• Anyone who wants to help make Google Chrome better — your feedback helps us turn good new features into great features, and using the Dev channel is a simple way for anyone to help.

Note: Dev channel releases are less stable than Beta channel releases. Expect the occasional “sad tab” or even browser crashes (if you turn on ‘Help make Google Chrome better..’ in Options, we’ll get the crash reports so we can fix the bugs).

Automatic updates of new Dev channel releases are published every 1-2 weeks

Subscribing to the Dev channel

1. Download and run the Google Chrome Channel Chooser (http://chromium.googlecode.com/files/chromechannel-1.0.exe).
2. Click the circle next to Dev.
3. Click Update to save your choice.
4. Click Close.
5. In Google Chrome, click the wrench menu and choose About Google Chrome.
   Note: On Windows Vista, updates from the About box require Service Pack 1. With 0.2.149.29 (the current release), on demand updates do not work in Vista SP1 if User Account Control is disabled.
6. Click Update Now to install the current Dev channel release.
7. Restart Google Chrome.

http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel/

A dircelo è Gamestop, in un report del 31/07/08 sul proprio sito, che dice:

Gamestop’s website reported today bonus features included in a pre-order of Mythic Entertainment’s Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning not only include early access but open beta and in game items. Flaring a few tempers, the community’s reaction was mixed annoyance and understanding. With no official word from Mythic Entertainment on this it seems Gamestop is not only predicting launch dates but announcing pre-order packages too.

Includerà come troviamo su questo articolo anche l’accesso all’Open Beta e ITEMS.

Restiamo in attesa di maggiori info.

In the week when Play.com sell out of their Collector’s Editions and start to send out beta keys, I found myself considering why Early Access to the live game is such a valued thing – even if it just means 3 days playtime before the masses converge on the game. So far, this is my list of why it was worth the extra money* to me (and um, yeah.. I still owe someone a bit of money for my CE!)

• You have a better chance of getting your fave character name
• You have a better chance of getting your guild up and running and getting the name you want
• You get to vacate the starting areas before the deluge
• Less server stress, less chance of un-smooth launch

These should all be pretty obvious. On another tack, we have less servers to choose from. I believe it’s been stated a number of times that there will only be limited servers for the Early Access Brigade (my fabricated name there), maybe one or two of each server type, whatever they think they need. Now, this sounds bad initially, because:

• You don’t get to choose from the entire server list from the start
• If guilds are split between early access and non-early access players, then there’s a chance the server will be pretty full before the entire guild can join it, which may lead to problems, depending on how they deal with overcrowding

But on the other hand, let’s assume that the Early Access Brigade are all fairly into the game, enough to blow £60 on a game that they could otherwise have got quite a bit cheaper by not getting the Collector’s Edition (and this assumes there are no pre-order bonuses about to be made available on non-CE purchases). They’re the kind of people who hang out on internet forums and blogs discussing Warhammer Online and what they look forward to or fear about the game. They embrace RvR as a concept – and they’re all going to be choosing from the same limited list of servers!

So.. surely those servers will have a higher chance of being populated by experienced MMO players? Which again, is a big advantage to both the experienced and non-experienced alike. It’s not like the later servers won’t have experienced players on them, some guilds might want to wait for the non-early access servers so everyone can join at the same time, or because they want to pick an emptier server to start on from the entire list of potentials. But for those of us who’ll probably stay on their early access server, I believe it means we’ll have a fairly knowledgeable population on both sides of Order/Chaos split.

This, for me, is a huge benefit and one that I hadn’t really thought about until all the analysis of the WHA figures and speculation that new players were more likely to pick Order. Does this mean early access servers will be weighted towards Destruction? Or that it won’t matter as much, because at least the Order players might have more chance to be organized from the off? I have no idea, that’s all in the realms of ‘who knows’ but I do think the poll results might affect the early access servers more than the ones that come later.

*obviously it’s not the only reason the pre-order Collector’s Edition was worth the money to me – who wouldn’t want the choice of extra heads, some extra quests and funky items?

Hi all, first off, I’d just like to thank everyone for the massive increase of readers recently, you’re making it all worthwhile with your continuing support.

I’d like to thank Funcom for a relatively good Early Access release compared to other MMO’s. After the original delays of a few hours, I thought the performance was good and there wasn’t much lag. I played quite a lot over the weekend, for me, and I got to level 11 with my Aquilonian Assassin on Sunday. Maybe not very quickly in a lot of peoples books, but for me, it always takes a while to get the hang of a new game. I found switching between the Quest panel to the Talents difficult at first, I was constantly forgetting which button did what.

Without any Beta practise as well, I was a complete noob to the game. I suppose that’s why I didn’t join the Beta, I wanted that first “5 minute experience” and I was happy that I could experience the really awesome intro, character creation screen and first few quests for the first time. There are quite a few problems with the game but they will probably get ironed out before the “official release” on the 20th for US and the 23rd for EU.

Dislikes

I didn’t like the opening instance, after the amazing entrance to the game, I didn’t like the fact that you had to kill every enemy to get to the a high enough level for the next “section” of the instance. It was too formal, there was no space for freedom or adventure, I liked the actual fighting and learning the combos and techniques, I just didn’t like the way Funcom presented it.

Graphics

I thought that the graphics were pretty awesome, I managed to crank all the options to the highest and still get an average of 20 fps, I’m not going to keep it like that, but I think that the game is beautiful that high. I found that some textures to be bland and they looked like they didn’t even try to texure it, until you practically walk on top of it and then it suddenly becomes brilliantly textured. It kind of breaks the immersion a tad. I like the bloom feature a lot. The port of Tortage after looking in dark alleys is amazing. Below are a few screens of what I mean.

You can really see how the natural eye would react to seeing such a bright scene.

It’s a very beautiful game and with such a vibrant selection of scenery, from deserts to mountainous areas, I doubt I’m going to get bored very quickly.

Quests + NPC’s

Throughout about level 5 to 10 I was very confused about which quests I should be doing, I was either fighting people much lower level than me, or getting repeatedly killed by getting overrun by adds, which were levels above me. I was hovering between the day and night modes of Tortage, constantly stuck between quests which were ever green on my questlog or red. I’m pretty sure that I’m the only person getting these problems, mainly because most people had that Beta experience, and were pretty used to the games mechanics. I’m not complaining too much though, it’s a learning curve and I’m not expecting them to “spoon feed” me the way through the game.

The quests in game, despite me being a bit confused about which level I should be doing them, are very good at immersing you in all the back story of the NPC’s, from spying to stealing, there are a lot of interesting tasks to do. There are still quite a lot of kill 10 rats quests, but they have to put them in there in order to level you up. I especially like just walking around Tortage and speaking to random quest givers, each of the stories are usually about the same topic (in the case of Tortage, The red hands tyrants). I very much like the fact that you can “talk” to the quest giver, you enter a cutscene when you talk to one, where the NPC does some excellent voice acting. I often found myself reading the subtitles of what they said, but waiting for them to finish talking anyway. You develop a real hatred for certain people (Red hands) and you are often in the good books for different people (Prostitutes and market sellers). For some reason, I often forgot that the game isn’t nice, and that you don’t always have to be a goody two shoes. Despite this, it felt good to be congratualted for your efforts, and it’s nice to be the “hero” even though I didn’t necessarily want to be. Unfortunately, one problem I did see, is that there were “good” answers (e.g. Yes I’ll help you) and “bad” answers (e.g. Find someone else whore!). Usually if you choose the “bad” option, the NPC closes the conversation with you, and in order to get the quest, you need to click through all the “good” answers to get there. They should make it as though, if you decide to be mean and harsh, they treat you differently. They could fear you and offer a greater reward, or just ignore you altogether. This would provide a great risk for the snide, evil-doing players out there.

Tortage is a great city, day and night, theres a huge appeal for me, I love the dark alleys, and long winding streets. The people walking around are very realistic and act extremely human like. With the immersion of the quests, everytime I walked into a Red hand Guard, and was stopped, I always felt a bit on edge and a lot of bad feeling towards the level 20 NPC’s, I’ve never played a game that actually grabbed me enough to be almost a bit afraid of a computer character.

One thing I did find a bit odd, is that at level 6, when you walked into a courtyard it was empty, but when you get a quest, suddenly it’s filled with pirates, I personally think they should have left all the kill quests for outside Tortage, unless it’s an assassination quest or similar. They should keep all the really inovative quests, like the “spying on” one for inside the city.

The NPC’s are always very well distinguished from their peers, you can tell who’s a pirate and who’s a prostitute, the costumes are very well represented with who’s wearing them. The one time I thought was quite funny, was when I talked to a quest giver, and her chest, which was clothed with a dress, flickered in between being textured and not being so textured, A lot was revealed during that conversation, and I’m not talking about the story line. (Nipples, if you didn’t see where I was going with that!)

Combat and Gameplay

I really like the directional striking system, I do find the fact that you have to use your left hand to move, press 1, 2 or 3 AND use 4, 5 onwards for the combos, a bit tricky at times. With a melee class like the Assassin, it is quite difficult to keep on top of all of it.

I really like some of the combos however, they are very well animated and I love some of the finishing moves, the decapitation and the resulting blood splatter is perfect for the gameplay. It’s very rewarding after a close fight to lop of the enemies head.

I haven’t yet tried  to be a caster, and haven’t seen any of the animations, which I’ve seen other players use. They look absolutely amazing, they look as though the caster has just called upon all the storms of the world, it makes it seem as though it requires a huge effort to cast.

I’m not that happy with the class I chose, the Assassin is quite meh. It’s basically a glass cannon. Lots of damage can be dealt, but none taken. I was fighting some crocodiles for example, I killed 1 in about 4 seconds, but, 3 more came at me because I was a few centimetres into their agro range, I thought to myself, ok, I can deal with this. Before I had started my first combo, I was dead. Literally in seconds I was finished. It’s a lot easier to fight multiple mobs for questing and experience, and without being able to do that, I don’t think I’ll enjoy the Assassin. Once I get to 20, I’m probably going to roll a different class, like the barbarian or Hunter.

Overall

I wasn’t hugely impressed with the game. For all the wait, I did expect a tad bit more from Funcom. Now that isn’t to say that I didn’t like it, I thoroughly enjoyed the first few hours that I played, it was just that it wasn’t great.

I’ve heard a lot of great things about level 20 – 40, and my opinion is likely to change a lot. Even so, for the time being, my mind is set.

Conan Watch

]]> http://lodis.wordpress.de/2008/05/18/age-of-conan-vorbesteller-ausgesperrt/ Sun, 18 May 2008 11:21:16 +0000 LoD http://lodis.wordpress.de/2008/05/18/age-of-conan-vorbesteller-ausgesperrt/

Vor einigen Wochen startete der Vorverkauf des MMOs Age of Conan mit einer Pre-Order Box. Auf dieser Box wird neben speziellen Ingame Items wie zum Beispiel einem Nashorn als Reittier auch der Zugang zum Early-Access geworben.

Vor einigen Tagen musste Entwickler Funcom aber feststellen das der Ansturm auf den Early-Access größer war als erwartet. Funcom reagierte 2 Tage vor Start mit einer Limitierung des Early-Access und verwehrt somit vielen Kunden den früheren Start ins Spiel obwohl dies Ausdrücklich auf der Verpackung angeben ist.

Das dies die Community verärgert ist verständlich, da sie ja mit dem Erwerb der Pre-Order Box erhofft haben das sie bereits am 17. Mai spielen können und nicht erst zum Release am 23. Mai. Einige Kunden haben bereits ihre Bestellung storniert und berichten in diversen Community Foren über ihren Unmut und Frust gegenüber dieser Aktion.

Auch die Aussage seitens Funcom das “wer zuerst kommt mahlt zuert” stimmt nicht. Einige Kunden von Amazon haben ihr Produkt bereits am frühen Samstag morgen registriert und haben keinen Early-Access mehr bekommen während andere Spieler erst am Nachmittag ihr Spiel registrieren konnten und jetzt ohne Probleme spielen können.

Funcom hat mit dieser Aktion und falschen Aussagen an Glaubwürdigkeit und Vertrauen bei sehr vielen Spielern verloren und somit bereits vor dem offiziellen Release schon viele Kunden vertrieben und verärgert.

Auch ich persönlich bin von der Limitierung betroffen und muss wohl leider bis zum 23. Mai warten während andere Spieler bereits spielen können.

I’m finally in Hyboria and playing the real game. No more waiting! No more beta!

I created a bunch of characters, primarily on Wiccana. That’s the unofficial roleplaying PvE server, which suits me very well. Now I’m playing my Priest of Mitra through the beginning storyline. Sigh, I did the exact same thing a half dozen times in beta already. It’s still fun though.

The game looks and runs great! Everything actually looks better than the beta. Funcom did something really nice with the lighting and atmosphere.

The image links to a real screenshot, which at my resolution is a fairly big file. I’m currently playing at a medium setting with 1920×1080, 8x AA, 8 aniso, character shadows and 1000m view. I’m getting a solid 25 to 45 FPS, depending on my location.

Okay, back to the game!

UPDATE 5:00pm EST. I’M IN!! I’m in the game and playing. I haven’t had a chance to do anything except create a character and get to the beach. But it looks great, runs great and even loaded much faster.

——

UPDATE 4:35pm EST. The message in the patcher has changed to a welcome message from the Game Director. The patch server is being hit hard, so keep trying until it succeeds. My patcher finally started downloading a new patcher (at snail’s pace between 2KB/s to 22KB/s).

——

UPDATE 4:08pm EST. Well, it’s past 4pm now and no word yet as to their progress. The official sites are down again, including the poor forum which was probably accessed to death. This is an MMORPG launch and they are never smooth. Even World of Warcraft was a mess and look at it now.

Another possible source of information for people is Funcom’s IRC server. It is moderated, so it might get information in a more timely manner. irc.funcom.com in the #ageofconan room.

——

Official word from the Age of Conan patcher:

The servers will be available very soon from now. The final things are getting tweaked and tested. To make sure everything works the way it should we want to test it properly. Due to that the servers will open in about 3 hours from now (8pm GMT). So sharpen your weapons and test your war gear one more time. The gates to Hyboria will open very soon now.

Thank you.

I am not surprised at all, although that doesn’t make me less disappointed.

The fact that all the official websites are down is a really, really bad sign. Funcom really needs to get their act together with the PR. Was it an intentional decision to take down all the websites because they expected a storm of incomings? Or did it get brought down by the traffic?

Makes me almost hope that Funcom is being corporate sabotaged. I wonder how far other companies would be willing to go to ensure Age of Conan has a rocky launch? I’m just kidding, but still interesting to consider.

What really sucks is that I’m feeling compelled to keep trying to log in because the servers just might come up before 4pm. Well, even at my most optimistic, I still think it’ll be 2 hours minimum. We’ll see.

See you all in Hyboria! (hopefully)

This is pretty funny….and worrisome.

The official forums are down.

The community website is down.

The official Age of Conan website is down.

The Funcom website is down.

It’s only the early access launch, not the general launch.  If all those services are down now, then what is going to happen in a few days?

On a good note, patch server is up.  Billing website is up.  So let’s hope that the game servers will actually be running on time.  1pm EST!

To get the word out, Wiccana has been unofficially selected by the community as the RP-PVE server.  Looks like several bloggers are also choosing Wiccana.

Less than 24 hours, and I’m already feeling impatient and fidgety.  Funcom really did a great job marketing their project.  The buzz is enormous.  I ordered GTA4 a while ago, it arrived and I haven’t even bothered to unwrap it yet.  I don’t want anything to take my mind away from this early access weekend.

For people who aren’t in the early access, TenTonHammer.com has a few great videos from the launch event in Oslo.  You can find that here.

Funcom’s official website and forums are dragging, probably due to the sheer amount of traffic.  The early access also sold out far faster than they expected.  This is not a good sign for the actual launch.  I am starting to fear that the servers, authentication and billing will be swamped and maybe even broken due to the traffic.

Funcom is probably frantically setting up additional servers right now.  At least, I hope that’s what they are doing right now.  It’s far better to spend too much money and have excess capacity, instead of pissing everyone off by screwing up the launch.

I finally finished downloading the early access client (13.4 gigabytes!).  The patcher downloaded another 450 megabytes.  I’m glad I’m not with Comcast anymore because I don’t have to worry about my internet access being turned off.  In total, I’ve probably used up almost 40 gigabytes of bandwidth on Age of Conan already.

Official statement from Funcom about Early Access

I wanted to link the official word from Funcom before the rumor mill takes off and creates a mass hysteria of people complaining that they can’t connect.

It starts May 17 at 5pm GMT.  So according to greenwichmeantime.com, that is 1pm EST on Saturday.