I avoided it for as long as I could but it seems as though I'm giving in.  I'm talking about grind.  You know, that horrible "gameplay" mechanic solely designed to keep you playing for an inordinate amount of time for minimal benefit.  The rant atm is about a title in the game Guild Wars.  Perhaps I should first elaborate.  A title in Guild Wars is a measurement of a certain activity. 

These range from the common: Number of missions completed, amount of world explored. 
To the comical: amount of time spent intoxicated, number of sugary treats consumed. 
And the insane: Amount of faction gained for one side or the other particularly in Cantha (one of Guild Wars' featured continents).

Each title has a range (that is a series of markers denoting how far you've gone on that title and how much it takes to max or finish that title.  The Savior titles (Savior of the Kurzicks or Savior of the Luxons) is the one with which I have the biggest problem.  To max this title you need 10,000,000 faction... yep, that isn't a typo.  10 MILLION!!!

I currently have 157,000 (notably, I haven't spent a LOT of time working on this title but let's do some math).  It is said that a repeatable quest on the Kurzick side is the de facto fastest method to completing this title.  This quest rewards 400 faction for about every 1.25 minutes of time spent (this is with quick runs in and out of town and neglecting going to drain your faction when you reach the max [you can only carry 10,000 faction at a time otherwise it won't accrue any longer.])

The difference between the max and my title is 9,843,000.  At a rate of 400 faction every 1.25 minutes lets see how many minutes it'll take me.  It will take me 24,607.5 runs to complete my title.  These runs, in total, will take me 30759.375 minutes.  Take that an divide by 60 we get 512.65625 hours.  Say we do this for, on average, 2 hours a day.  256.328125 days.  That's right 71.96% of a year given 2 hours of play time, every single day.

Oh, and why am I doing this?  What in the world could make me want to take part in this masochistic behavior?  Because I "might" get some reward in Guild Wars 2... way to go ambiguous reward system!

*Edit* Oh, I should probably update this.  Once I got home I remembered that if you use the faction to get skills or to transfer for guild faction you get double the points in your title.  So I've basically cut my time in half... though, 128 days is still a LONG time in my book.

I was messing around in Fireworks and the following "painting" came out.  I call it "Alone"  Let me know what you think.  If you click to view the larger version keep in mind that it's 1680x1050.  Both of these images (the smaller and the larger are GIF's to save on bandwidth.)  If you'd like to view a full version please let me know.

I have to admit. I'm a HUGE fan of bargain bin games. A majority of my game collection has come from them. A large part of that is having a great store from which to buy them. If you keep an eye out and are aware of what games might be selling for Half Price Books is a great place to pick up your next game for your collection.

Such was the case this evening when I picked up both Dungeon Siege I and Dungeon Siege II Deluxe Edition. (I didn't have either one... I've played the demos and liked them but never went out of my way to buy them at full price.) So I'm pretty excited to add these two to my collection.

However, as I've said before, I'll often buy many games at once. So tonight I also bought Neverwinter Nights 2 and its expansion (Mask of the Betrayer) and a game called Audiosurf from Steam. Yeah, I'm not at all sure what I'm going to play first of these. I also have Jade Empire: Special Edition sitting on my desk waiting for me to finish with my current game.

Oh! I hadn't mentioned. Right now I'm playing through the action RPG "The Witcher" by CD Projekt RED. I should get back to my games... I have a lot of playing to do.

As a side note: There are other games that I've recently acquired that I could list but I figured I had enough links in this post.

Well they arrived and I got the machine built! It's a monster of a machine compared to my old one so I'm very pleased with the performance. The 20" widescreen certainly doesn't hurt ;)

On a side note I also came to a realization. There are those people in the world that buy very expensive cars and then put them in a garage after driving them only a handful of times. It seems to me that I do the same thing with computer games. I have a LOT of them. Many of them I've never finished. A handful I can say that I've finished and mastered. Of course, I'm not counting the ones that have unlimited playability (Online FPS, MMO's, etc). My wife pointed out that the more likely problem was that I got distracted with the new and just never went back. I think she's correct. One of my struggles in general is that I can become distracted and completely forget about something. I'm going to make an effort to play through the many games that I have and perhaps even leave a bit of a review or something here (I need material.)

The other thing that is REALLY cool about this post is that I'm posting it through FireFox without even visiting my blog. I'm using an add-on called ScribeFire. It's possible that many of you are already aware of this add-on and are using it yourself. If you aren't, check it out, it's pretty cool.

I'm really excited at the moment.  I placed an order on newegg.com this morning for a series of new computer parts to upgrade my aging Athlon 64 system.  I should note that this will not likely increase my productivity because all I generally want to do is play games.  (This is a short post apparently.)

About 2.5 years ago I was working on a small space game.  As most of my programs end up they usually become awkward test beds of random things.  This game isn't a game at all.  It became the way that I was learning about the HGE particle system and a pseudo-Zero-Gravity elastic propulsion system.  I say pseudo because I didn't look up anything (so there wasn't a verification of the "elastic" part) and it's hardly scientific :)  NOTE: This is not an example of Best Coding Practices!!!  Below is the last version I was working on that I conveniently called SpaceF (for compile F (after a, b, c, etc).)  The archive includes the source and art (the art isn't mine.)  The code was compiled in Code::Blocks a FREE C++ IDE that you can check out here.  The version you can find here was updated to be current for the 1.81 release of HGE.

(Click the picture to download the archive!)

I've spent some time since Thursday working on a couple of new Graffiti themes.  These weren't designed by me only "Graffitized".  <-- That's the word I use for saying I took an existing template and put in the Chalk tags to make it rock & roll in Graffiti.

The first one I did was a theme call Lovely.  I left this theme completely as-is except for modifying the banner image with a picture of my daughter:

The second theme that I modified is called Nature's Charm.  This theme was also completely unchanged except for changing out a banner image.

I've said it once and I'll say it again, "I'm a LAZY blogger!"  I try to keep a blog going but in the end I just run out of words.  More often the case I feel as though the things that I do and/see aren't really worth sharing. 

I'll have the occassional rant about a lady at Wal-mart or a recruiter continually calling my line at work to place developers (sometimes not even .NET ones.)

OK, I have to rant.  I've had *2* calls in the last 10 minutes from recruiters trying to place a VB developer.  What's even more annoying is they absolutely can't submit resumes like everyone else through a job site like JobBurner and ALWAYS use a Private Number.  You know, I'd like to have their number so I can interrupt their workday with useless and pointless banter.  Perhaps I'll call and talk about gaming mice, or perhaps about my newest coffee mug.  The point being it's annoying.  *End Rant*

Yeah, so I'm a really lazy blogger.  I'll work on putting something up here once a week or so.  Maybe then my views will go up!

Graffiti 1.0 has been released for general public consumption; see the following announcement for more information.  As such I suggest you download it and give it a try today!  You can find Graffiti downloads and information here.

Here are some thoughts from important people about Graffiti.  They think Graffiti is cool and so should you!

"My favorite thing about Graffiti is the charts, I love being able to easily  see which posts are most popular and how many views I've had a day and exactly what was viewed each day!" - Sapphy

"I think Graffiti is an awesome application; setup is a breeze." - Ryhoward

"I love how easy it is to skin Graffiti.  Recently when working on the We Are Microsoft charity challenge we used a dual Graffiti + CS2007.1 solution and had to create the exact same theme for both platforms.  The Graffiti version took about 1/10th the time as the CS one." - KevinH

Well it's been a little while since I made my last post so I'll make a plug about a 2D graphics engine/library that I like.  It's called Haaf's Game Engine (or HGE for short.)  You can visit the website here! 

The library consists of the primary engine along with a helper library for various functionality

• Sprite & Animation
• Font
• Particle Systems
• Distortion Meshes
• Resource Files (.zip archives)
• GUI Controls

Because the library is built on DirectX it's blazing fast for a 2D engine.  If you ever wanted to make your own 2D game (space invaders, platformer, whatever!)  I suggest you give HGE a try.



A good friend of mine also developed an extension to HGE with more options for platform style games.  The extension is called Qaf (at least that's what Pedantic Pedro calls it.)  If you want to know more about Qaf or what Pedro is working on I suggest you visit his website.