Perpetually Bored

I’ve been rather skeptical about modern shooters, ever since Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 disappointed. Over dinner yesterday, I questioned a friend whom I have noticed been playing Battlefield: Bad Company lately on Steam on how the game was.

The predecessor, Battlefield 2, was a fantastic game, up until version 1.5 or so, where they added in air-dropped vehicles. That was a step in the wrong direction, and it made a mess out of my beloved game. Waning interest in the game saw the number of servers in my region vanish, and I was forced to quit.

Initially, I wasn’t too impressed. My friend then directed me to a number of gameplay videos on Youtube, one of which featured the destructive environment. A recon trooper went into the objective building, placed a number a C4 charges, and lured a number of enemy in. The recon trooper promptly ran out, and set off the C4, physically demolishing the entire building. This wasn’t just an explosion in the building, but rather, the entire building was brought down and collapsed on the enemy within.

I was sold. I had never envisioned the day where a game would feature such extensive, physics-driven destructible environment. There have been promises over the years, and destructible environment was first introduced and featured in the 2001 game, Red Faction. The implementation however, was very limited. You could fire enough rockets to blast a hole through a wall, but you couldn’t bring the wall down, much less an entire building.

In the next few years, destructible and interactive environments would slowly be featured in tech demo after tech demo, but no one was able to develop a fully marketable product out of it. Then came Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter in 2006 which allowed for physics driven explosions if you had a PhysX card. This was followed by Crysis and Far Cry 2 which included more destructible objections. Flora  shifted as you move through them, and you could mow down some.

Now, in Battlefield Bad Company, you can reduce an entire building to rubble. Realistic physics and destructible environment sure has come a long a way since 2001. It was a slow development process, but we’re there at last. You’re getting my $49.90 on this one, EA.

Intel Atom is a powerful little platform for it’s cost.  It works well as an office productivity or Internet access desktop, as a Home Theatre PC (HTPC) for watching and recording videos, storage server, and a even a small network AD server. Another area it can excel is as a home/SME router.

I’ve ceased using commercial routers aimed targeted at the home segment for a number of years now. What made those routers unfeasible was the growing bandwidth available to home user and the popularity of peer-to-peer, meshed, file sharing – where a large number of connections would be made simultaneously to grab various parts of the same file from different users. The earlier home routers with their low memory and processing capability couldn’t handle the load, and enterprise routers were, and still are, out of the reach of my financial capability.

That was when I turned to building my own. I started refurbishing an old computer with additional network cards. The system with I replaced today ran on an Intel Pentium III 450 MHz processor with 256 MB of ram, and had been for a number of years.

At the simplest level, any computer with more than one Ethernet adapter can be used as a router. On, Linux, routing can be done through iptables, on Windows, either through Internet Connection Sharing or Routing and Remote Access on consumer and server variants of the operation system respectively. However, there are Linux-based distributions which are designed with the sole purpose of turning a PC into a dedicated router which can rival commercial offerings in terms of performance and features. One such example and the one that I’m using is m0n0wall.

Lately, my old setup has been giving me issues, which I attributed to a failing power supply. Replacing it wasn’t the best of idea since the system was old, really old. This was the opportunity to get rid of and replace the system. A new one wouldn’t cost very much, and the much lower power draw of the Atom was welcomed too. It was the perfect system for the task.

I did some shopping, and although some manufacturers, such as Gigabyte, do offer Atom boards with dual GbE adapters, none of those models made it to the local market. In fact, they’re relatively few Atom models here in Singapore. I had to settle for the Asus AT3GC-I, which sports a dual core Intel Atom 330 processor with a single GbE port, resulting in me having to purchase an additional network card, filling up the only PCI expansion slot available. The 2 GB of RAM that I bought was a huge overkill, but the stores were only carrying 1 GB and 2 GB DDR2 memory, and the cost between the two was a mere $2. Add in a mini-ITX case, and I was almost ready to go.

Since m0n0wall takes up only a mere 10 MB of space, I decided to skip the hard disk. Instead, I opted for a 4GB USB thumb drive as the primary storage medium. It was the lowest capacity one I could find.

Assembly was a breeze, and was the easiest one I’ve done to date. The motherboard fit right into the case, and since the only peripheral I have is one expansion card, it was all very straightforward. No issues with lengthy graphics card that wouldn’t fit into the casing, nor a billion front panel chassis connectors to deal with.

For m0n0wall installation, I downloaded physdiskwrite 0.5.2 and the generic-pc-1.3.img from http://m0n0.ch/wall/downloads.php. Opening the command prompt on my Windows 7 PC with Administrator rights, I inserted my newly bought thumb drive in, formatted it, and began writing the m0n0wall image to it by executing the following.

physdiskwrite –u generic-pc-1.3.img

I was displayed a list of the drives available and selected my thumb drive as the destination. One-sixth of a minute later or under, it was done. I plugged the thumb drive into my Atom system, did a few changes in the BIOS to set it as the default boot medium, and booted. The picture below shows the initial boot.

I spent the next half hour or so copying over my configuration from my previous set-up, and the hour after that rearranging some furniture and re-doing cabling. The beauty of m0n0wall is that it can be used right out of the box if you have no need for more advanced features such as traffic shaping. There really is little configuration.

I still maintain that the system is an overkill. Under load, memory and CPU usage hardly crosses 5%. However, a lesser powered system, such as one of Soekris Engineering’s offerings, would have cost just as much or even more. I’m extremely happy with my new setup. Before I end the article, here’s another pictures, from the rear, where you can clearly see the 4GB thumb drive which would be permanently plugged in as the boot medium.

It all made sense as to why the Collectors were going around planets and star systems kidnapping the human population the moment I saw this. In Terminator Salvation, Skynet went around harvesting humans in order to skin them for their T-800 terminators. The Collectors were simply doing it on a much larger scale, for their supersized terminator.

The Alliance and/or Cerberus better have a plan for the security of Shepard’s mom.

Despite my initial rants about controls of Mass Effect 2, I’ve been able to overlook it and have grown to like the game to the point of addiction. I started on a new character this week, rerolling just after the start of the suicide mission, which puts my first run at about 75% complete. I had messed up my chances of entering into a romantic relationship with Miranda (tip: always choose a pro-Cerberus option when talking to her, especially in the scene when both of you are sitting on the bed), and I wouldn’t have that. Not only do I fail at romances in real life, but even in a largely scripted video game, I didn’t stand a chance either. Sigh.

In traditional RPGs, the amount of influence your character exerts over the rest of the party is usually represented by a numerical score. Not in Mass Effect 2. There isn’t an obvious way to tell how much a particular member of your crew likes you, although some might argue that not representing a quantifiable figure for a relationship might be more in the realm of reality.

As I advance in Mass Effect 2, I begin to find that the game draws multiple parallels to various Sci-Fi universes. An especially obvious one for me was that of Stargate. The Collectors seem to imitate that of the Wraith. Even the layout of one of the Collector ships mimics that of the Wraith’s Hive ships with the layout of captive pods along the entire interior hull. Similarly, when embarking on Tali’s personal mission and listening to her explaining about the Geth their history with the Quarians, it seemed exactly like that of the Asgard and their creations, the replicators. Additionally, the Geth also resembled the replicators in that they’re about to rebuild from splintered parts.

I brought the similarities up merely as an observation, and not as a stance against Mass Effect 2. On the contrary, I enjoyed the melding of various elements of Sci-fi seamlessly into the Mass Effect universe. I hardly think of it as a rip-off at all because if it were considered as such, every other Sci-Fi and fantasy game would be equally guilty. As Joseph Campbell documented in his book, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, every heroic and epic story follows more or less similar curves.

Back to Mass Effect 2.

The controls are abhorrent.

From the opening sequence of “press any key”, I knew I was in for disappointment. The game was largely designed for a console in mind, with the PC version was added on more as an afterthought,  made all too apparent by the menu all the way down to the movement and team interactions. I’ve great respect for BioWare and the quality games they have churned out over the years, but this feels like a slap in the face for an old time PC gamer such as myself when an excellent game title turns out pretty poorly on the PC.

The game lacks the free movement of elements which are staple to PC shooters such as crouching and peeking. Instead, it plays out more like an arcade game where you have to run up to a predetermined object and interact with it to duck behind and shoot. Instead of a having an enumerated list of dialog options accessible using the keyboard, the options are circled around a wheel for the usability of the D-pad or joystick on a controller. The simplistic commands that can be issued to AI teammates frequently have them running in the path of fire and to their doom too.

Although most games released on multiple platforms usually turn out pretty poorly on at least one of them, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3 did very well on both the PC and the console version. Perhaps there are points which BioWare can learn from Bethesda in the development of multi-platform games. As for team movement might I suggest a key that brings up map overlay and being able to path out simple waypoints?

Previously, I mentioned about ridding myself of clutter. Being a modern day geek, I’m also a digital packrat rather than physical one. I have a staggering amount of approximately 2 TB worth of data consisting of movies, application installers, pictures, music and a ton of other stuff. I dedicated most of this weekend to clearing up my digital storage, ditching a large number of TV episodes that I would never intend to re-watch, for example. The minimalistic approach to living doesn’t end at the realm of physical belongings.

The cost of storage is not what it seems, despite the plummeting cost of hard drives. Although US$50 will net you a 500 GB drive these days, which may seem to work out really cheaply at $0.10/GB, that cost only covers the basic storage of data, and does not take into calculation the maintenance and upkeep for that bit of data. The cost per gigabyte when the upkeep is taken into account is much higher.

What do I mean by maintenance of data? To insure data against loss either through human fault (e.g. accidental deletion) or mechanical fault (e.g. faulty hard drive) or natural disasters (e.g. fire breaking out at home), that bit of data needs to be backed up on various levels. For me, this is done through a combination of redundant storage technologies for the live data, local backups and offsite backups.

Assuming I have a file of 50 MB, the amount of space required to maintain that amount of data rapidly swells by at least a magnitude of 3 (one original, one local backup and one at the offsite backup location). Furthermore, at each location, versioning, that is to say, keeping multiple different copies of the file at different points in time, might need to take place if I frequently modify the file. This is to allow me to recover the original if I made changes to the file that I come to regret later. Even if I keep the copies through the use of an extremely efficient differentiation algorithm that only store the changed portion of the file rather than creating an entirely new file, that further adds on to size. My 50 MB file maybe taking up to 160 MB at this point, spreading across various storage platforms, some more expensive than others. Offsite backup through an online provide is notoriously expensive, for instance. At this point, the cost per gigabyte rapidly swells.

Despite the general mentality (largely propagated by storage providers themselves) that on modern day computer, there is no need reason to delete anything, that notion is detached from the truth.

If I were to appear as a messed up individual from the first day I arrived, that would be the expectation of me, and no one would bat an eyelid if I failed to deliver.

However, if I were to perform optimally since day one, but on one day, unable to deliver a particular piece of work, the wrath of the brass above me would be incurred and all their fiery anger and resulting consequences brought to bear upon on me.

Compared the first and second case. The former would be multiple failures with little or no consequences, whereas in the latter, it would be one tiny road hump, but with drastic consequences.

The conclusion drawn is that it would be far more beneficial for one’s well-being to fail consistently rather than occasionally.

Expectations are such a strange thing.

I made a new character in Dragon Age Origins today, starting on my second run through the game. Dragon Age has lost none of it’s charms, and the I was amazed and taken in as much as if it were my first. The experience of starting out as a mage apprentice under the rule of the Circle of Magi was nothing liked that of my previous character, a human warrior and noble of House Cousland.

Previously, when Calreth the human warrior visited the tower where the Circle was housed, it was already in ruins. Valreth the mage on the other hand, had the opportunity of experiencing the tower in its full glory. Its corridors were bathed in the warm glow of torches and its halls were filled throngs of students. Valreth even managed to blush when he overheard two girls whispering in admiration about how he was the quickest mage to complete the trial of Harrowing. First Enchanter Irving was especially proud. Valreth seemed well-poised for a quick ascend up the hierarchy  of the Circle.

It was not obvious to anyone, but deep within, Valreth harbored a secret discontent for the life in the Circle. He despised how the leadership bowed down to whims of Templars. Although Valreth was firm believer in Andraste’s words that, "Magic exists to serve man, and never to rule over him”, he felt that the Templars’ fear and mistrust led to him, and his fellow mages, being shackled by the fact that they had magic in them, living under the threat of annulment each day, rather than being able to utilize that magic to serve man.

When friend and fellow student, Jowan, approached Valreth for help to escape The Circle and live a life of freedom with his forbidden lover, Lily, who was an initiate of the Chantry, Valreth felt that it was a noble cause. As with any plan remotely resembling one of a military operation, it went horribly wrong. They were all arrested, and Jowan was forced to use blood magic, a highly forbidden art, in order to escape. Lily was disgusted, and chose the Aeonar, a former proving ground of the Tevinter Imperium turned prison, over her love for Jowan.

As for Valreth, branded a criminal and with no alternative in sight, he turn the French Foreign Legion of Ferelden, the Grey Wardens. He would live out the reminder of his life fighting for the Grey Wardens from today on.

I don’t really have a list of things I want to accomplish in this year, nor even a few rough bullet points. This year is turning out to be one of those whereby I’ve to make a number of major decisions regarding my life, but I don’t feel quite ready for it yet. However, one of the directions I’ve been meaning to steer towards is to lead a minimalistic lifestyle.

Previously, I’ve touched a little on topic through my post regarding my varying levels of connectivity. This time, I’m getting rid of things which are more tangible, and physical.

I was greatly inspired by two articles, the first about a family who lives in a Yurt out in the Alaskan wilds, and another, a challenge to declutter by getting rid of non-essentials, leaving only 100 items. I currently already don’t leave too much a footprint, with the most space consuming items being my computers and collection of books at home. Weekdays I spend living on a military base, with only a set of uniform, a towel, a few changes of underwear, toiletries and my ipod. Essentially, that is the baseline of what is the absolute minimum. Everything else is just clutter, and optional.

That being said, I do have a number of ‘leftovers’, such as clothes that I no longer wear, stationary that are no longer relevant (like the rulers that lets you draw all kinds of funny shapes), lots of electronic and computer components that I saved because I imagined that they might come in handy (which didn’t), etcetera, etcetera. Time to nuke all that crap, and what better place to start clearing fluff than with fluff itself?

Goodbye, my collection of random stuffed animals from childhood. May the The Salvation Army find you new homes.

Although not immediately obvious, Aion does actually offer a trial through its ‘Refer a Friend’ program. It is extremely limited however, and you’re given either 5 hours of playtime, or a level 7 character, whichever comes first. In my case, I was booted out of game promptly after dinging level 7.

My initial impression was that despite the quests, it felt grindy. Then again, it is an NCSoft game, and given their history of Lineage and Lineage 2, it didn’t come as much of a surprise. The game is beautiful, with detailed atmospheric and flora effects, largely thanks to the CryTek engine that it uses. I didn’t run into any performance issues during my solo play, but I wonder how it would handle during PvP and raids.

I’m quite tempted to play further, mostly because it gives me a chance to play with members from my Lineage 2 guild of Uprising.