wnd's weblog

PlaneShift

I spend virtually all my time in front of computers. Most of the time I'm either at work, coding, or home, coding. Periodically I waste my time playing games. When I get bored, I usually go through some Atom and RSS feeds such as Slashdot and The Daily WTF. Sometimes I browse Wikipedia, and sometimes I end up following the weirdest links.

About a month ago I ended up reading " Comparison of massively multiplayer online role-playing games" at Wikipedia. I had heard of PlaneShift before but never tried it. I decided to give it a try.

PlaneShift is a free MMORPG. The source is free as in speech and released under GPL while the content isn't. The content is free as in lunch, but the licence protects the artists by not allowing to use their work elsewhere, and the project by preventing artists to leave the project, denying usage of their contribution. I will not get into details of the world, there's plenty to read about it on the official website. Instead, I'll tell about my experiences with the game. Please note that I have not played any commercial MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft!

First of all, PlaneShift is about role-playing. Character creation is quite in-depth, which not only determines character's initial skills and attributes, but also helps to think about your character's background and personality. While the game does have plenty of quests to complete, emphasis is still on role-playing and not butchering monsters. When you enter Yliakum, you're likely to find players chatting using their character's personality.

PlaneShift doesn't have character classes such as ranger or mage. Instead, characters will have to learn necessary skills, be it handling sword, making swords, or casting spells. To improve their skills, characters first need to gain progression points. Completing quests, slaying monsters, and using your skills is rewarded with experience points which turn into progression points when your experience points reach 100 %. Furthermore, you need someone to teach you the theoretical part of a skill. Most skills require practical experience in addition to theoretical knowledge.

Then comes the other side of PlaneShift. PlaneShift is buggy and different from many computer role-playing games. Talking with NPCs is done with free text input, so sometimes completing a quest (or getting a quest) can depend on right choice of words. Sometimes saying wrong words or giving out a quest item at the wrong moment can prevent you from completing (and sometimes from discarding) a quest. Players get to use magic by gathering so called glyphs and using them to research spells. The game has no ready-made list of available spells, so people will just have to experiment with combinations of glyphs. Loading textures sometimes fails, and you'll see some of the world covered with zebra stripes or colourful checkerboard. Sometimes you cannot deal any damage to monsters and/or the monsters cannot hurt you. It also seems to be a trend that the server either crashes or is restarted at least twice a day.

There are many opinnions in the Internet about PlaneShift and its developers, and not all of them are positive. Not everyone agrees with developers' way to deal with bug reports or quest walk-throughs. There are people who think PlaneShift sucks because its graphical models are not as pretty as in other games and because the world is much smaller than what years and years of development would make you expect. Those who like PlaneShift, seem to be quite enthusiastic about it -- and I can see why, even though I'm not much of a role-player myself. However I think I'm getting there, eventually.

Windows is Free

There's an interesting article at tlug.jp about the cost of Windows and GNU/Linux, approached from Average Joe's point of view. Is Windows really worth the money for general audience or are free alternatives cheaper even after having to go for more expensive hardware? Why do people often ignore the cost of pre-installed Windows? Why should they care?

N810 and built-in e-mail client

My and my curiosity. Sigh. When I was told the built-in email-client on N770 was bad, I should have believed them. Instead, I wanted to believe there would have been progress since then, and wanted to experience N810 e-mail client myself. Bad move.

The first impression was "OK". I didn't like how the thing looked, but settings up an account with GMail was straightforward. It started retreaving the headers -- all 5000 of them -- so I just waited. Once receiving headers was finished I scrolled down and doubletapped on one of the emails. Scrolling was horribly slow but I figured 5000 entries in the list would explain it.

After tapping one of the emails a new window opened, showing nothing but the header information. After a few minutes of waiting I still didn't have the message body. I closed the window and concluded that the client was not suitable to be used with GMail. I opened Accounts dialog and clicked "Delete". I confirmed the deletion and waited. And I waited. Switching to desktop and back to e-mail client gave a clear indication that the device was busy doing something. I didn't know what it was and at this point I didn't care much. After five minutes of waiting, the dialog was still there, all buttons disabled. I killed the client from X-Term and tried to restart E-mail. Nothing happened. Oh great, did I just manage to break this?

I rebooted the device and tried again. Now E-mail would start and there was nothing in Inbox. I quit the client and continued to try different application. A few minutes later the device started blinking the LED and gave an indication I had new E-mail. Huh, how? I had just deleted the account, right?

I opened the E-mail client and suddenly my Inbox was filled with my GMail e-mails. I tried to open the Accounts dialog again but with no success. I tried and tried, but nothing happened. top showed enprocess was consuming all the CPU time so I killed it. Soon after the E-mail client popped a generic error dialog like "Error occured" and died. I restarted the E-mail client and enprocess with it. Nothing had changed.

Finally I decided there was little to lose so I opened an X-Term, cdd to ~/apps/email/Main/Inbox and deleted everything. I restarted E-mail, canceled connection to GMail and finally managed to open Accounts dialog and delete the GMail account. My E-mail experience was finally over.

My Nokia N810 is finally here!

Back in November -- or maybe it was at the end of October -- I decided to participate in Maemo developer program once again. I mean, even though I was turned down before, you never know. In 9 November I got a b0rken email telling me how things went wrong in a PHP-application -- and btw you should receive your discount code shortly. Huh, wha-- I was accepted? Nice, maybe I could get the device before Christmas. If only I had known...

Everyone received the discount code on 12 November. It would do no good for time being, but it would be a start. A good start. Days passed, a week passed, and the device was launched in the USA. No news about the developer program. Weeks passed, a month passed. I accepted the fact the device would not be here by Christmas. Soon it would be 2008. Finally, on 4 January, "The discount codes of the N810 maemo contributors program are going to be valid from today onwards". I placed the order and hoped for the best.

After placing my order I immediately checked the order status, which had my phone number as street address. I was a little confused and worried until I received a confirmation email, which had my address right. Also the order confirmation page, which I had printed as a PostScript file, had it right. I few days passed and the status was still "Open". On 7th we talked about this thing on IRC and it turned out some people had received an UPS tracking code -- and I had not. On the other hand, at least a few people who had the tracking code, couldn't view the order status page. The next day I got an email with the tracking code, and the order status page soon stopped working. It didn't matter, my stuff was finally being delivered, estimated to be here on 11th.

I spent the following days reloading the tracking page every half an hour or so. On Thursday morning (10 Jan) one of my friends got a call from UPS asking if it was OK to deliver the package around 14:00. At 9:59 my package was marked as "OUT FOR DELIVERY". I eventually got the call myself, and my wife received the package back home. After two months of waiting my new toy was finally here.

So I have the device here, now what? I'm not sure. :-) I spent the last night playing around with it, trying different things. SSH server and client both work perfectly, ScummVM works like a charm, using N810 as X-terminal is a breeze (although I'm missing two mouse buttons). Built-in Maps application is slow and it has horrible UI but it works. Meamomapper is faster but I dislike the UI even more. Built-in media player doesn't suit me but it's better then what I thought it would be. Canola looks pretty but I don't like it too much. UKMP is far too complicated for me, and selecting a track to play with Kilikali takes too much effort. Mixed feelings but I'm sure things will turn out fine. All in all, Nokia has come a long way since N770.