Please note:I must stress these are my impressions from the beta (v1.4), and may not represent the final product.
Because I bought Command and Conquer 3: Kane's Wrath, I was given access to the Red Alert 3 beta program. Additional keys have been released as part of an exclusive deal between EA and Fileplanet, first to their (Fileplanet) premium account holders but most recently to the free accounts too.
The beta is limited to online multiplayer only and to four maps (2x 2v2 and 2x 1v1 maps), but there is no limit to access to the three factions and their respective units.
Gameplay
It's hard to comment if the gameplay is good, bad or otherwise in a restricted beta of a game especially when it is limited to just multiplayer, but I can draw comparisons. It plays much like any RTS - you collect resources, create buildings that provide X resource (in this case, electricity), create units, provide defense, or unlock further units (in the case of Russia; the Allies and Empire of the Rising Sun both 'research' the next tier of units). There is nothing particularly different or innovative with the gameplay presented in RA3.
The previous two games released by EA since acquiring Westwood/C&C rights have been C&C: Generals (and it's expansion, Zero Hour) and C&C3:Tiberium Wars (and it's expansion, Kanes Wrath), if I was to pick which one RA3 is most like, it'd definitely be Generals.
Generals has a "rewards" system, where you earn "experience" by doing stuff, which could include creating buildings, units, or removing substantial chunks of the enemy. In return, you could spend your experience on three rewards trees (dubbed at the time 'General Abilities'), which included unit upgrades, aerial assaults, spawning units anywhere on the map, etc. RA3 features the same system, although the rewards don't seem to be turning-the-tide-of-battle as some of the Generals rewards were (hint, this is a good thing – it sucks when all your hardwork can be undone by an enemies reward).
Zero Hour introduced another dimension of combat (sea, alongside air and ground) to Generals (which does not appear in C&C3), but is present in RA3. While this does have the problem that the developers have to balance yet another playing field, it really does add so much more to the game.
Graphics/Art Style
While I haven't played a lot of the older games in the C&C universe, I've played a fair bit of Generals, and C&C3, and it is safe to say the visuals in RA3 are nothing like those. The easiest comparison would be Half-Life 2/Counter Strike to Team Fortress 2. The former are 'realism' shooters while the latter is a stylised, over the top, brightly coloured piece of art. RA3 falls into latter category, having many over the top effects and everything is very brightly coloured.
Like all games thus far based on SAGE (or RNA as its now known) it has appealing visuals in the unit models, detail textures, and particle effects, but throw it into a multiplayer arena and massive slow downs occur unless all players turn the graphics quality down. The game doesn't become choppy as if frames are being skipped, it simply slows down the game speed so it takes longer for things to occur. With C&C3, I found settings that were silky smooth in single player, even during the epically scaled final battles, would bring the game to its knees in even the smallest 1v1 game online.
Problems
While this is a beta and you must expect most bugs or problems that will be fixed, it is hard not to see some that will never be fixed given the track record of EA.
Gamespy For reasons that have never benefited actual gamers, Gamespy is involved in the multiplayer aspect of RA3, providing the chat lobby and game match making services. It is extremely rare (Quake…sure) to see a game that has benefited from Gamespy's assistance with lobby/match making – and RA3 is no different. It mimics all the flaws of C&C3's online play, where available games often don't appear at all or the list continually expands and contracts so fast that it is often impossible to actually select the game you wish to join! One of the worst 'features' is that you have to be in the chat lobby (and currently there is over twenty) of the game creator to see the game; change lobbies and you see a different subset of available games.
Netcode One thing that has played SAGE/RNA games has been poor networking code. During the days where I semi-frequented a gaming focused NetCafe, it was rare to see a LAN game of Generals finish without at least one of the players crash out due to network issues. The initial release of Kane's Wrath was plagued with a 'out-of-sync' issue, which after a period of time would just lose connection with other players, rendering the game useless. EA denied that such a problem existed (stating it couldn't be replicated and that a very small percentage of the player base was effected) for some time, until they decreased such occurrences with a patch (but not totally removed) after three months!
In RA3, I've already seen one or two out-of-sync issues, and many players randomly dropped from the game!
Balance In one of the patches C&C3, the ability to construct multiple defenses at once by building multiple cranes was removed. It was a fairly drastic change, and effected singleplayer as well. I can't help but shake the feeling that there will be some major balance upsets after the release of the game. Russian submarines currently seem to be overly powerful just as their Terror Drones are – to the point where I've had a few games where people have quit when others have gone Russian.
Will it drain my wallet?
The inevitable question is: despite its flaws, is this game "good enough" to be worth shelling out for? If you're a hard core C&C/RA fan, it's got some solid stuff in there which you'll love. If you are a C&C/RA fan but are a Westwood purist? Not a chance – there is too much of the "EA Influence" inherited from Generals and C&C3. I fall short of being a fanatic to the series or to Westwood so the decision is a little tougher. I've been burnt by the flaws in Tiberium Wars and Kane's Wrath and generally poor support by EA in those games as well as Battlefield 2/2142, but RA3 does offer some genuinely different gameplay to be entertaining.
My answer is, no, I won't be buying it upon launch because I don't feel it is worth the launch RRP of AUD$99.95; while the game might be fun, it's just too "same-y" in both the good and bad aspects. If I can find it for AUD$60 or under, I'll reconsider, but for now the similarities in gameplay to C&C3 and Generals are just encouraging me to hold tight to my money until StarCraft 2 is released.
Shapeways is a "printing" service which will take your 3D model, and turn it into plastic. Awesome.
It takes a little while for the approval process on signing up (about two weeks for me), prices are variable on which material you use as well as how much of it you use. Your creations can be uploaded via .stl, .dae, .x3d and .x3db (don't forget their guidelines!) or you can use their creator (make sure Java is installed) to modify some existing designs.
Changing technology has slightly altered my build list. With the launch of Intel's G45 motherboards, I decided to upgrade my HTPC with a Gigabyte GA-EG45M-DS2H, meaning I had a spare Asus P5K-VM which knocks the previously selected motherboard off the list.
I decided to go for a single 1TB drive – while it didn't represent the best price per gigabyte (currently 640gb HDD's do, something like 14c/GB vs 18c/GB), it wasn't overly expensive, gave me the convenience of a single drive with a lot of storage, and means I'll have more filespace by the time I exceed all my SATA ports (P5K-VM has four SATA ports).
*Not the price I paid when I bought it, but current going price in Victoria
That's $34 under budget! Had I bought the NSK4480 ($95) and gone for the cheaper GA-G31M-S2L ($61) the total would have come down to a much more impressive $467 (or $133 under budget, even less if you don't mind more noise and could drop the Scythe CPU cooler).
I realise this doesn't include the cost of Windows Home Server (~$200) which bumps it up to $766 (/$667 if you chose the cheaper parts). At this stage a simple NAS unit or something along the lines of an Apple Time Capsule ($699 for 1TB) may seem like better value, but the thing to remember is this system can be easily upgraded to 4TB of storage by just putting more drives in, or up to 9TB (then you approach physical limitation of the NSK6850) by adding a SATA controller card! Most simple NAS units (at least, cheaper than this WHS build) have only one or two drive bays!
Oh, and for the record, I was after the NSK4480 instead of the NSK6850, but my local MSY were out of stock at the time. The differences come down to size and price, where the NSK4480 is smaller (7 vs 9 expansion bays) and costs less ($95 vs $135).
The Cooler
You may be wondering why spend so much on cooling such a low end CPU, when the stock cooler barely breaks a sweat on it? Well, despite 'mini' being part of it's name, the Mini Ninja (above) is massive – it can take a lot of heat. Combine that with the slow spinning 120mm case fan included with the NSK6850, and temperatures have remained under 35c (mostly runs at 22c, while being under my desk in a low ventilated area) and the CPU cooler doesn't contribute to noise generation at all – it's hard to tell when this thing is operating!
Power usage
As I stated at the start of this series of posts, I wanted a system that had a low power draw. Measuring this system, it uses somewhere between 54 –> 65w, sitting mostly on 55w. To be perfectly honest, I'm a little disappointed, but it turns out the 430w EarthWatts PSU is ~70% or less efficient at these draw levels. With that in mind, that brings the realistic draw of the system down to 38 –> 45w. When I've got time, I'll look at swapping in the 380w PSU from my HTPC, to see what the differences are.
At 60w (we'll say this is the average draw), that equates to $68/year to run. (365days * 24hours * 60watts * $0.1294 (cost per kWh Origin Energy charge me) = $68.012)
Component choice helps keep the power levels low – the E1200 is a relatively low (processing) power CPU and as such uses less power than many other CPUs, the hard drive consumes up to half the amount of power of other drives at the expensive of throughput (the drive spins between 5400 and 7200RPM) and although negligible, a single RAM stick obviously consumes less than filling all four RAM slots.
I picked this one up via Rob Relyea (of the WPF Team), the long awaited and much requested DataGrid for WPF is available on CodePlex. For more information (including a screenshot), Vincent Sibal has a detailed 'how to use it' post
Requires .NET 3.5 SP1 to run, and it'll eventually will make its way into the WPF core libraries (I think?). Out of band releases are nice.
My initial choice for a G33 board for my HTPC was to get whatever would work for the right price, with the goal of turning it into a gaming capable machine by adding a PCIe x16 graphics card which would also give me DVI/HDMI output. As cool as gaming on a 40" 1080p panel is, the keyboard and mouse just aren't up to scratch in their current forms.
When I needed a new motherboard for a new system (my Windows Home Server box) and I learnt that Intel G45 chipset boards were around the corner, offering AVC/VC1/MPEG2 hardware decoding with DVI/VGA/HDMI out, I put one and one together and ended up purchasing a Gigabyte GA-EG45M-DS2H motherboard, the only G45 motherboard I could find for sale (at $169) in Australia.
The G45 chipset introduces the GMA X4500 HD, which brings Intel inline with both ATI (780G/HD 3200) and NVIDIA (GeForce 8200) by offering an integrated video chipset capable of hardware assisted decoding of Bluray and HD-DVD's. In reality this translates to reducing CPU usage during playback of hi-def discs by making the GPU do a lot of the work. Previous Intel chipsets have been pretty woeful in this regard, actually hampering playback if hardware assist is enabled.
Gigabyte GA-EG45M-DS2H Features
The back panel is fairly well endowed, HDMI/DVI being my main concern, but optical audio out, 6 USB ports, eSATA, Firewire, 10/100/1000 Ethernet port, and six stereo audio jacks.
Internally it consists of the usual assortment of ports you'll find these days. The only things of interest are 5 SATA ports (6 total in the system, if you include the eSATA port on the back), two PCI slots, a PCIe x1 slot, and a PCIe x16 slot which is only capable of PCIe x4 speeds. I can see the reasoning – people who buy this board should really be using it in a HTPC, and with the newfound speed of G45 an dedicated graphics card isn't needed, but it still seems "wrong". This is an issue specifically with the Gigabyte board not a blanket problem with G45 boards.
Oh, and a Trusted Platform Module (TPM), for all the times you need your HTPC to be uberlysecured?
Lets face it, the feature set on this makes it a perfect board for a HTPC, general home computer, or heck, even a workstation/personal server, which has always been the aim of the "G" chipsets from Intel (perhaps Larrabee will change this?). It is not designed as a gaming board, and the PCIe x4 slot posing as a x16 slot makes sure of that.
The Test
I had trouble enabling Cyberlink's PowerDVD to take advantage of the G45's hardware acceleration, so I turned to ArcSoft's Total Media Theatre (TMT). TMT's CPU usage always seems to be a little higher than PowerDVD's (I'm not sure if it is the application or their codecs), but the latest version worked fine with offloading to GMA 4500 HD.
CPU Load HA Off
CPU Load HA On
Power usage HA Off
Power usage HA On
V For Vendetta HD-DVD/VC1
70 –> 80%
~30%
70 –> 80w
70 –> 80w
Jumper Bluray (TS-Container)/H.264
90 –> 100% (Jerky playback)
~30%
83w
61 –> 70w
Jumper used less power (with HW Acceleration On), despite identical CPU load, because the TS contained file was moved to a hard drive, instead of being read from the disc. I'm guessing a Bluray/HD-DVD drive draws 10 –> 15w while playing a movie.
As you can see Hardware Acceleration works for VC1 and H.264/AVC (and one would assume MPEG-2, but I don't have any 1080p MPEG-2 sources) which reduces CPU usage as much as 70%, which in turn reduces power usage by as much as 22w. The Hardware Acceleration Off values are roughly the same as what the G31/33/35 chipset's will achieve with power usage a watt or two higher.
The Bottom Line
Pro
8 Channel LPCM Audio (ATI's 780G chipset only supports 2 Channel LPCM, but ATI's newer 4000 series cards, and Nvidia's GF 8200 boards have 8 Channel LPCM). While I'd love to use this until I get a better audio system it doesn't matter to me. Still, it's nice to somewhat future proof it.
HDMI/DVI/Display Port support
"Works as advertised" – X4500 HD does indeed do the hardware accelerated decoding for H.264(AVC), VC1 and MPEG2 as described.
Dolby Home Theater (encapsulates all analogue audio to a DD stream, which is handy when you have a 6 channel analogue stream which would otherwise be down-mixed to stereo)
Cons
Price. As it stands, it's cheaper to go with a G31/33 motherboard, and throw in a low end video card from ATI or Nvidia and you'll get the same hardware assisted decoding. On the other hand, that will net you higher power consumption, and if you choose a non-passive model noise will be increased.
While the PCIe x16 is physically a PCIe x16 slot, you'll only get PCIe x4 speeds out of it.
Well, McGee is back to it again and this time in partnership with GameTap is offering the first episode (A Boy Learns What Fear Is) of his game series, Grimm, free.
I'll cut to the chase, its 193meg of rubbish.
Graphics
In a gaming world obsessed with realistic graphics, it's refreshing to see games that differ from the norm, be it celshaded hijinks like XIII or Team Fortress 2, or seemingly water-coloured games like what I've seen of Diablo III thus far.
Grimm certainly lacks the realism, but unfortunately also lacks and sort of quality in the graphics department. Utilising the Unreal 3 Engine of course gets it gets motion blur, but incredibly low quality textures, models and even animation reminds me of the first generation of game mods, certainly not something you'd see from a "seasoned" professional such as McGee.
Gameplay
Mario or Sonic are fine examples of platformers. You run around, you collect things, you dodge or defeat evil, and then you arrive at the end of the level. Often there will be a series of jumping puzzles that require varying degrees of skills to time and pull of the jumps perfectly, else you face doom. 3D platformers are much the same.
Well, Grimm's a platformer too, a 3D one at that. Unfortunately, there is no real evil to dodge or defeat, you simply run around somewhat slowly spreading "darkness". When you stand still, you pee. Yes, you pee. You pee and then you can jump to where your pee hits. So there goes the puzzle bit of jumping – you're given an exact guide as to where you'll land.
You also get to perform a "buttslam" by pressing the jump key twice. It spreads darkness a little further, or stuns those trying to clean up darkness.
Should you still insist on playing this game, there are six levels which shouldn't take you more than five minutes each if you want to convert everything to darkness. If you don't, maybe two or three minutes each. The entire game was over in less than the time it took to download for me (I'm on 1.5mbit ADSL)
Bugs
Apparently will throw a bit of a hissy fit on x64 installsTurns out this is a problem with the GameTap installer which requires a 32bit system. Works fine if you install from 'setup.exe'
If you've got UAC turned on, you must force it to run as Admin, otherwise you can't change game options and even worse, you can't progress anywhere in the game. You'll finish a level, and it'll restart the level.
Alt tabbing caused instant crashes for me.
Closing Thoughts
I don't know what the target audience is – it'd be too dark for littler kids, the dialogue is too dry/boring for 'adults', and the gameplay is too boring for everybody. Edit: American confirms (in the comments) that the game is aimed at the casual gamer.
Despite how little I think of reviews giving games a rating, I'll have to give this one a over generous 2/10. The first point is for the price – free is good, and the second is for licensing the UE3, so that Epic can stay in business long enough to inevitably make UT4, or better yet, Gears of War 3.
McGee, if you read this I'm sorry, I'm not trying to break your heart, but this game was crude not just in the idea of game, but execution of the game as well.
My Demo's Happen Here entry (entries closed last month) was on Visual Studio 2008, how it can rock your socks by creating Twitter clients in WPF and Silverlight.
For interests sake, the screencast was recorded using Microsoft's Community Clips Recorder and edited with Windows Movie Maker - both free (well, providing you have Windows). Community Clips Recorder is fairly basic when you compare it against Camtasia, as it has no editing, zooming, or highlighting capabilities. However depending on the situation Camtasia is overly complex and the price difference is something to be considered.
I use Salami's Movie Organizer for metadata for movies, but for TV I wasn't entirely happy with the ruby script, because I'm not a huge fan of CLI, and it didn't get "posters" for seasons/shows.
So, rather than complaining about it, I created TVScout (I…shouldn't be allowed to name things, first name was VideoBrowserTVMetaData). It requires .NET 3.0, I figure since VB is for Vista, that really shouldn't be a problem. Like the ruby script, this makes use of TheTVDb for metadata.
TV Scout v0.1
Features
Fetches "poster art" (where available) for seasons and for series
Renames files, gets metadata, etc, just like the ruby script.
Handles S00E00 and 00×00 (and S0E0, 0×0 and anything in between)
Limitations/Known bugs/problems
always updates metadata (for series.xml)
always fetches posters
always renames files (if they match)
can't set custom file structure filters
Files must be in a season folder. ie, "Battlestar Galacatica (2003)\Season 1\s01e01.avi"
Unlike the ruby scrapper fetches all the metadata for a show first. This means if you're only processing one or two episodes, it'll be "slower" (30seconds?) depending on your connection. For more than that, it should use less web calls.
To Do
I want to get a popup/prompt which will do a basic search, then ask what show you're talking about, so that the folder names don't' have to exactly match theTVDB's. Ie, For the "remake" of Battlestar Galactica, the folder has to be "Battlestar Galactica (2003)".
Parse files not in a season folder so that they put inside one (/create season folder), then processed properly
Make the options usable
Process "root" directories (ie C:\TV\) instead of just specific shows (ie, C:\TV\Battlestar Galactica (2003))
Make source code available via CodePlex - just a time/can-be-botheredness thing. I'll do it when I get the popup working
Instructions
Run TVScout, and browse to a folder of a particular TV show, ie "C:\Red Dwarf"
Put each seasons files into their own folder, ie "C:\Red Dwarf\Season 1"
Assuming the filenames contain "s01e01" or "01×01" (for episode 1, season 1), when you "Fetch Metadata", TVScout will get metadata, as well as any available images for each episode, season and finally overall series.
Fire up Windows Media Center with Video Browser installed, and your show should have metadata associated with it!
Disclaimer Use this at your own risk. While it works pretty well for me so far, but I won't be held responsible for loss of data, hair, or anything else you may lose in a result of downloading or running this app.
Download (save to HDD first, then run, don't just run from IE, that will most likely crash)
If you're like me, navigating video in Windows Media Center can be painful. The titles are small, the images are more often than not blank, or worse – get dropped so WMC regenerates every time you go into the folder. On the flip side, navigating music is easy because of the album art and metadata.
Enter Sam Saffron's Video Browser. Video Browser is a MCML plugin (so it is compatible with Media Center on the XBox 360), which uses MyMovie's XML for metadata, so if you already use MyMovie for metadata that's perfectly usable, but I've found Salami's Movie Organizer to be the easiest to use to fetch metadata for movies. This makes Media Center have even more WAF (Wife Approval Factor)! Apart from a poster-view of all your videos, it also brings up meta data (such as actors, rating, running time, director, year of release and a blurb!), making it easier to decide what to watch.
Video Browser also handles TV episodes/seasons, however the only way to get metadata for it so far is with Sam's Ruby TV scraper, which while it works is sucky if you don't want to install Ruby.
