Posted by Tom on 02/02/2009 at 15:24:45 in category Blog.

today was the worst snow storm in the uk since 1990. there was about 30cm of snow on the ground when i woke up this morning, the school phoned and told me that school is cancelled for tom, half of the shops is the country did not open today, the rest of them closed somewhere around the middle of the day, most of the country came to a standstill and they are saying it has cost the economy more than a billion pounds.

for us here though, it was awesome. we took tom out at 08h30 this morning, playing in the playground downstairs and took a walk to canbury gardens and played in the snow on the banks of the river thames.

If you'd like to check out some pictures, i have put together a small montage here

Posted by Tom on 01/31/2009 at 21:12:41 in category Blog.

a little bit of drama with the release of the 3.2 version of eternal silence over the last few days. as i have mentioned before, when this version comes out, it will be integrated into steam with steamworks, valve's API set for allowing things like achievements, full integration with steam, etc. it will also be downloaded through the steam client rather than as a seperate mod that you download and install outside of steam along with the source sdk base in steam. this will, of course, also allow all future updates and extra content to be automatically downloaded and keep everyone on the same version without having to worry about people going to get patches and such themselves and installing them. another consequence of this is that they can release a lot more updates as very minor patches, fixing even just small bugs without having to worry about waiting for a bigger patch release, every minor update will be installed automatically through steam.

as you can imagine, this is a pretty big release for this mod. a lot of extra content, new game modes and the benefits of being integrated into steam. the only trouble is that they announced it was about a week away in october 2008. then it got delayed and left4dead launched. everyone pretty much figured that will delay it a bit more, as no-one would want to release parallel to a huge title like that.

it's now the end of january. still no sign of it. almost no-one still playing 3.1. you'd be lucky to find even a single server full most of the time.

so, dan, the creator of the mod and still the lead guy, announced earlier this week that the release is going ahead on friday, 2008/01/30. people that had not looked twice at the mod in months, waiting for this release are commenting, several servers are full of people playing, anticipating the new release and saying goodbye to the old one.

just minutes before the announced time of release, dan posted a message saying that there is a huge bug in the integration into steam and that the release is being delayed until this is fixed. probably a week or so. pretty big dissapointment for those of us who like this mod and really want a chance to be able to go live with it, get gaming with the flood of steam users who will give it a try (14 million steam users will all have access to it is they have at least one source engine game, and it is free).

of course, these sort of bugs can happen and there is no real way to predict something that did not happen before integration that now suddenly does, but it probably would have been better to not announce a time at all until you know for sure it will fully work.

they could even release the 3.2 version as a standard mod, outside of steam in the meantime, then switch to steamworks when that version is ready. there is pretty much no chance they will do it at this point though. they talk about not wanting to lose impact from the steamworks release, but from as far as i can see, they'd be lucky if even a few hundred people play it, but when it hits steamworks a percentage of 14 million steam users are going to be trying it. there is no way to know precisely how many that will be, but if the first wave of steamworks mods are any indication, it will far more than they can handle. it really will not be affecting the impact for having released an update for the few who actually still play it right now.

still, nothing we can do right now but wait, and we've already had to wait several months past when it was "a week away", and we are certainly very close to the release now.

Posted by Tom on 01/28/2009 at 03:17:33 in category Blog.

we've been mostly playing a lot of titan quest recently, getting pretty far into it so far. most of the group have stuck more or less together through it, josh, ann, kate and myself. it has been imensely fun so far and everyone is enjoying it. we sort of lost jonathon last week, but he might come back in with us at some point...

i spent a bit of time looking at some guides and finding the best equipment, etc for my character to wear. i like to rush headlong at massive groups of enemies and i was dying entirely too much. not every time, but enough to be annoying. i had been picking up special items every now and then, some i could not wear yet due to requirements, others i just did not really look at, not wanting to break flow in the game. anyway, i researched it and got a pretty decent collection of stuff together to up my skills, my defense and my attack and distributed some skill points i had been saving up for when i had time to figure out the most effective distribution of them.

i had started out a your basic warrior type and put points into things like better attacks, damage absorbtion, dodge attacks, etc. i had avoided things like dual-weilding and a spinning attack that targets four or more enemies, as they generally need a lot of points put into them before they become useful. then i saw josh using the nature mastery, which is a sort of magic user that concentrates on healing, has wolf companions, can have a nymph also and can cast protective and offensive spells on whole groups. seeing the wolves pretty much sold me on it and i chose it as my secondary mastery and pumped all my points into the wolves for a while until i got to the point where i could get the nymph.

now i have my equipment sorted out, i put all the points i had been saving up into dual-wielding and the spinning attack and it makes a huge difference now. i do not have points in the protective or offensive spells yet, as i concentrated on getting my main attacks up first, and i only had a single point in healing until i set up this stuff for the same reason; josh is pretty good as the party healer anyway. since setting this stuff up i have put a few more points into healing to bring it up a bit as a backup to josh, but most of the time i am in the thick of the battles and don't really have a chance to heal anyone except during the lulls.

i have still died a couple of times since optimising as best as i could, of course, but i have generally been doing much better at cutting through the hoards, and the new attacks are especially good against large groups of weak or medium enemies.

overall, it is great fun and i think we are all enjoying it a lot.

Posted by Tom on 01/22/2009 at 11:05:13 in category Blog.

i mentioned before tom starting full-time school this week. he's only been going full-time for the last four days, including today and already the teacher is talking about how troublesome he is.

sure, he can be boisterous, sometimes even less than careful in his play, but i have never known him to be aggressive and i have been looking after him since he was born. the way his teacher tells it, he is purposefully hurting other children on a daily basis and terrorising them.

She has started a "log book" of his "aggressiveness", rudeness and the injuries he supposedly caused to others. when i asked her about his behaviour today, she showed it to me and described it as "proof" of his aggressiveness.

When i questioned her about the specifics of some of the notes she had recorded there, it was immediately obvious that she became defensive and seemed to be justifying what she had written through gross exageration. things like writing in there that tom hit a classmate in the face and stomache. when i asked her to elaborate on it, she was obviously thrown back and went on to describe how he had hit a girl in the class, completely unprovoked, aggressively. when i questioned her further and asked directly "so you are saying you witnessed him, for no reason at all, walk up and punch her, closed fists, in the face and stomache? show me how in actions please."

the way she showed it, it was quite obvious that it was just kids playing, there was no closed fists, no aggressiveness, he had pushed her with open hands. to me, pushing someone while playing, however naughty that might be, is a very different thing from walking up and punching someone. i confirmed it a little later when i spoke to tom about it. they were just playing together and pushing each other, then they got caught and the teacher wrote it up as if tom had aggressively assaulted a classmate.

another thing she wrote for today was that he had tried to suffocate a boy in his class. she quoted the boy as saying something like "he covered my mouth with his hand" and "he pushed very hard and it was hard to breath and hurt me". it doesn't take a genious to realise that a four year old child does not speak like this and would never come out with a spontanious quote like that and i told her that i do not believe that boy could have said that, even if it had happened as she described it. at best, i can only imagine something like that being coaxed out of a four year old child.

when i spoke to tom about this "incident" later, it turns out that it was just kids playing again. tom was not even the instigator. half the class was playing around, putting their hands on each others' mouth to stop them talking. it was done to tom, tom did it to someone else.

there are many other examples so far of this kind of gross exageration of kids playing being shown by this teacher as unprovoked aggressiveness and i have no idea why she has suddenly become like this. for my part, i have barely even spoken to her and it seems insane to me for a reception class teacher to single out children for this kind of unfounded victimisation.

kids will play and sometimes it will go a little too far, but you can't blame any individual for a group dynamic and you can't blame kids for getting out of hand.

another weird "coincidence" is that all of this has started happening just a few weeks after i talked to her about tom telling me he was getting teased, often along "racial" lines by some of the other children and that he has learned some "racially charged expressions" since joining this school. expressions i know that he did not know before going there.

naturally, she said they take that kind of thing very seriously and it will not be tollerated, i told her i was not complaining, i just wanted her to be aware of it and to watch out for tom being teased by others. she said no problem. then, right after, i have this crap to deal with.

i know tom is extremely energetic, and he is very friendly, he will play with everyone and run around all day. but i also know for sure he is not aggressive, just boisterous and often stubborn. yes, sure, he often does not want to listen, and is sometimes naughty, but that is about a million miles away from the aggressive child that is a danger to other children that this teacher is describing.

i am thinking about writing a letter to the head teacher and complaining about this, objecting to this "record" being kept and rejecting the idea of it being proof of anything other than what she chose to write and pointing out the seeming victimisation and exageration here... but i am just getting really tired of everything being a uphill struggle. i really would prefer not to have to always fight against things like this, i just want to have a fairly smooth ride through life with these hassles.

that said, i will not be backing down from my principles and will not ever accept the word of someone else when it makes as little sence as this. i get the feeling it is at least partly because this teacher is a disciplinarian, which is fine for weak-willed sheep-like people who don't have enough intelligence to be distracted or realise their own point of view should count for something sometimes. tom is not the sort of child who accepts anything without question, he will always want an explanation and i am proud of him for his independance of thought.

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with all the gaming we've been doing recently, most notably with the new people in the group, johnathon, ann, kate, i've been thinking how much easier steam makes everything.

before, it would be a hassle to get everyone to install a game, get all the right patches, update to the same order, often needing to apply patches in the correct order, then needing to find a nocd patch to be able to run the game without the disk in the drive every time we play the game. basically it was generally pretty hard to get everyone on the same page, especially if they are not all that great with using computers.

when i first heard of steam, i did not like the idea of it at all. a forced registration system that you were required to use to play games that you had already purchased. this annoyed me quite a bit when it was first introduced, as it directly affected josh and i. a game we used to love to play a lot, day of defeat, went from working fine to not working at all, as they closed down the old network authentication system, called WON (world oponent network).

at that time i did not appreciate being forced to register my details with them, but steam was not the program it is now. they have since built in a lot of community features, opened up to other publishers, kept prices much lower than retail, plus frequently had special offers to reduce the price even further.

best of all is the fact that you can buy a game there, even purchase as a gift for someone else, and they will get installed to the latest version of the game automatically, no more patching. if a new patch gets released, it will be pushed to every steam user that owns that game automatically. everyone playing games in steam will always be on the same page as far as version numbers go. plus all their games are digital download, meaning no optical disk, meaning no need for nocd cracks. you just load up steam and launch the game you want.

all in all, our gaming experiences are a lot simpler now and a lot more fun. less time getting things working, checking versions, etc, more time just playing the games. there have been exceptions, of course, but a good game on a good distribution system, automatically updated is so much easier than before.

Posted by Tom on 01/21/2009 at 11:37:06 in category Blog.

josh and i played through most of the original titan quest campaign a few years ago, although we never completed it and we never tried the expansion campaign. we both bought it on disk, josh getting the north american cd release and me getting the uk dvd release. it had annoying copy protection that we found out about later, which greatly contributed to the bankruptcy of the company that made the game. annoying to the point of just dumping people out of the game and crashing, without anything to tell you it was because you were running a pirate version of the game.

both josh and i were running nocd cracks along with our legitimately bought copies of the game, a legitimate use in my book, i bought it, i do not want to put the dvd in every time just for it to run a check... it did crash a few times on us, but i do not think to the extent that internet pirate version users were reporting. another weird thing was the intro movies. i was forced to sit through and watch the entirity of them the first time i ran the game after an install, which i did not mind, because i like to watch them at least once anyway. after that i could skip them and get straight to the menu. josh never could, the game made him sit through the entire five or six minutes of video with no way to skip it each and every time.

anyway, that is just a little background to the our experience of it. it has been available on steam now for a little while, and at a decent price, original game and expansion together in one purchase. around the 2009 new year, steam had a pretty damn good sale and josh and i both bought copies of it on steam. since then, rimes (whom we have learned is usually called johnathon and not rimes, so i will try to refer to him as that from now on), ann and kate have all bought copies. kate was not quite installed yesterday, but josh, johnathon, ann and i all have started a compaign, previously not all together, but now all joined in a single joint campaign, whilst talking on skype.

all being together in a high quality skype call at the same time as all being on a game server together has shown us the limits of our internet connections and introduced a few problems, but we have mostly circumvented them by someone hosting the server and someone else hosting the call. of course, it's not perfectly smooth, but the experience was pretty good fun, all being able to talk and understand each other, all being in the game together. and not just two people, but four people becoming five when kate is set up and ready to join us.

i can remember our previous gaming experiences years ago, either with having to type messages to each other, breaking the flow of the game, or with crappy quality voip and would break up, cut out and even at its optimum sound tinny and hard to understand, and this is a far superior experience. because of the bandwidth issue, we gave the steam community chat voip a try, in the hopes of it using less bandwidth and being more managable, but in the end the consensus was that the quality of the audio was too low and it is better to have a few small lag issues and much better quality.

we are still not very far into the campaign and have a long way to go, but i am pretty sure i am not alone in enjoying playing very much. hopefully we'll complete the campaign and the expansion and i will be reporting back from time to time on our experiences and highlights of the game.