MOGS

A Small EVE Online Announcement

Direct from CCP

The Eighth Party at the Top of the World… now in a new location!

It is time to start marking your calendars for the 2012 Fanfest in Reykjavik, Iceland, it’s being held for the first time in the brand new Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Centre; an amazing new home for their Fanfest that welcomes you all with open arms.

Fanfest brings together players in a massive celebration of EVE Online. Travelers from all around the world gather in one of the most beautiful and unique locations the planet has to offer. Allies and rivals alike set aside their in-game differences to share drinks with one another and forge new friendships. CCP developers mingle with the community, always up for  “talking shop” and getting to know the fans.

Iceland is one of  the world’s must-see vacation destinations, and if you haven’t been to one of our previous Fanfests, we encourage you to come.The many wonders of Iceland await your arrival. The Sisters of EVE Program will give your friend or partner a chance to visit Iceland along with you: Details regarding the program coming soon.

Get ready for another crazy weekend of:

• Pub Crawling and hanging out with the developers
• Round Tables
• Presentations with new EVE Video Premieres
• PVP tournaments
• The Party at the Top of the World!
• Poker Tournament
• Battle of the Bands
• Silent Auction
• Live Agents
• Chessboxing?…..I guess not, but you can just imagine what those crazy devs are planning this time.
• And much more!

Further details, including flights and accommodation and Fanfest 2012 Access Pass availability, will be announced later, as the event draws closer.

DC Universe Online – Comic Con Demo

The beta for DC Universe Online will be starting soon, and the official release date is Nov. 2, 2010. It will be for PC and PS3. You will be creating your own superhero in this game, akin to City of Heroes. The cool part though, is that you will be able to interact with the established DC heroes and villains.

However, the difference between this game and City of Heroes is that you will start with your super powers, and leveling helps to tweak them. Also, if you freeze someone in place, they will turn into a block of ice, rather then just be ensnared with a small “root” visual. You can then pick up and throw the player. This is interesting, because in utilizing special powers, the game is dynamically creating objects, rather then just using visual effects.

In the playable demo at Comic-Con, you had to protect the Batcomputer in the Batcave from the Joker and Harley. You fight along side Batman, and lose points when the computer is damaged, or you or Batman are knocked out (which only incapacitates you for a short time).

Watch out Ventrilo, Mumble in the mix.

The guy’s over at wow.com have done a pretty good writeup on their blog post Ventrilo vs. Mumble ¹, but considering it’s not a site that every single WoW player visits regularly, or something most non-warcrafters even have a reason to visit, I wanted to take a few minutes to highlight their post and help introduce you to Mumble, a low latency VOIP program for gaming. This is an application that is mostly unknown in the MMORPG world, where Ventrilo and Teamspeak have dominated, it’s far better known in the FPS circles where the extremely low latency helps give it a competitive advantage when calling out those enemy snipers and getting teammates over to help defend your bunker.

Mumble, unlike Ventrillo or Teamspeak, was specifically created with low latency in mind, and along with an excellent voice quality there is just as much lag as you would expect on a normal land-lined phone call. The latency is so low in fact that it allows for perfectly normal conversations, and yelling “Meteor in five seconds” actually means “Meteor in five seconds”; not “Meteor in three seconds by the time you hear this”. It also features Auto normalization, which to me is a huge benefit because that means I won’t have to sit there every time a new user joins chat, or I join a new guilds chat, and manually adjust the voice volumes for everyone to be an equal level. No more whispered call out’s I can barely hear, and no more eardrum shattering hunter’s crying about their pet dying. If you’ve ever had to sit there and go through the “Ok, say something now”, following by some tweaking and then another “Ok, say something again.”, you will fully appreciate this subtle but amazing awesome feature. Mumble normalizes everyone’s volume automatically on the server end, and does it right.

I highly suggest heading over and reading their full article which goes a little more in-depth into some of the features and functions of this great VOIP program, and then going to sourceforge ² and grabbing a copy for yourself and your guild to play around with to see if it fits your need. Once this gets a little more widespread in the WOW world I definitely see it becoming the new requirement, so when your applying to a new guild and you see “Mumble is used for guild communication, do you have this installed”, at least now you will have some idea of what they are talking about, and hopefully your savvy enough to see the greatness of it and be able to throw a big fat CHECK down next to the question.

Jake@MOGS

1. source: http://www.wow.com/2010/07/18/ventrilo-vs-mumble/ ↩
2. Mumble Download: http://mumble.sourceforge.net/ ↩

Xbox Live Class Action Investigation

Abington Law Firm is currently investigating the possibility of starting a Class Action suite against Microsoft, seeking possible reparations caused from the massive bannings of Xbox Live customers using a “modded” version of the Xbox system to play pirated games.

Tens of thousands of Xbox owners have had their modified Xbox consoles banned from Microsoft’s Live service. Although modification of Xbox consoles is against the terms of use for Xbox/Xbox Live, Abington feels that Microsoft “conveniently” timed the Xbox console ban to occur just after the release of the new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 game and less than two months after the release of the very popular Halo 3: ODST game.

This “convenient” timing may have resulted in far more Xbox Live subscription revenues from Microsoft than it would have generated had these Xbox console bans taken place at some time before the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Halo 3: ODST. Additionally, sales of both COD and Halo would likely have been greatly diminished had the Xbox console ban occurred prior to the release of these games.

While Abington does feel that Piracy is a very LEGITIMATE concern for Microsoft and other content producers, they feel that Microsoft has chosen to use on of the most indiscriminate “weapons” in its arsenal in an effort to combat piracy – as a result, the use of this “weapon” has resulted in a great deal of collateral damage – many people were affected who had nothing to do with piracy and Xbox console functions that have nothing to do with piracy were also affected or disabled. Details aside, Microsoft’s bans could have been more measured.

Side Note:
Personally I think the facts are simple. It violates the systems terms of use, and also the Xbox Live services terms. They could just have easily R.R.O.D’ed all these systems, but instead they only banned them from the Xbox Live service. Essentially they are saying: Want to play online? Buy the game, otherwise have fun playing with yourself.

I’m sure there was some “collateral” damage like Abington says though, I’ve seen numerous reports of people getting banned for doing a simple fan hack to improve the cooling in their systems.

If you are an Xbox Live subscriber, had your modified Xbox console banned from Xbox Live, were not refunded a prorated sum for the time left on your subscription or have experienced other problems as a result of being banned, and would like to participate in a class action against Microsoft, Abington Law asks that you follow the link bellow and fill out the Contact Form to receive more information if they can get this lawsuit moving forward.

http://www.abingtonlaw.com/Xbox-Live-class-action.html

Netbook GAMING?

I’ve recently decided to sell my LAN box and in it’s place buy a new EEEPC 1000HE. Over the past few years, I’ve begun to do less PC gaming, more console gaming, and strayed away from larger machines. So I was after something very small and inexpensive with great battery life. The new 1000HE met all of these criteria; 10.1″ screen, Intel Atom N280, 160gb hard drive, upgradeable to 2gb of memory, weight around 3 lbs with the battery. Straight out of the box I swapped in a 2gb ram chip, installed Windows 7 and began tweaking it to my liking. I must say it’s very impressive for having only cost me $395 in total. It multitasks well, runs Aero, allows me to browse the web, and use chat programs, but how well does it game? Well as expected, it lacks in that department. The Intel 945 chipset isn’t known for mind blowing performance. However I did some research and discovered some very helpful tips and tools that have drastically increased framerates and allowed me to run games that would not run previously.

First: Download modded graphics drivers for the chipset, or manually mod them yourself if you’re savvy. They can be found at the link below along with everything else I am covering.

(http://intel9xx.moonfruit.com/)

Second: Download GMAbooster. By this point you should already see a performance increase.

Third: Overclock the N280 using SetFSB. In today’s world, overclocking is a simple task even for those who aren’t as tech-inclined as others. My 1000HE is currently clocked at 1.83ghz, up from the stock 1.67ghz ,with very little increase in heat or loss of battery life.

To run a few games that wouldn’t run under normal circumstances, use 3DAnalyze. There are other emulation programs discussed as well at the link I posted. These tools and tips are not exclusive to the EEEPC, one can use them on any netbook or laptop with the Intel 9XX chipset. On a side note, ReadyBoost works very well in Windows 7 with the 1000HE. I’m using a 4gb USB drive fully dedicated and I have a noticeable increase in application launch speed. If all you really wanted to know was, does WoW run well on a netbook? The answer is YES.

-Christian