"Chaotic Neutral"

Short answer: no! Full answer here. However when I had Flex2 beta2 installed, I deleted the JRE that installed with Flex because I already had the JRE 5.0 installed and it caused no problems at all. I don’t really like the idea that every application installs it’s own JRE on my harddisk (Maya is such another app). Not that the ~50Mb are wasting too much space but its getting confusing if there are many JRE’s installed and Windows doesn’t make this fact easier with it’s obscure environment variables configuration.

I finally spend some time to make myself more familiar with the Flex 2 Beta and this is what came out as a result: Star Wars Name Generator! It’s a small and modest tool to generate random names (obviously). If you’re a fan of the Star Wars Pen & Paper Role-playing game (like me) you might find this tool useful!

You can generate names for planets and for characters, there are some parameters that can be chosen from before pressing the Generate button. After that it will spit out a list of more or less useful names (some of them sound very exotic). Interesting names can then be dragged and dropped onto the right side list. All names in this list are stored in local shared object on the users computer until the Clear button is pressed. The Switch button displays the saved names in a text area from where the names can be copied to the clipboard. (Small update: Works now with latest Flash Player v9).

Finally I got myself up to completely overhaul this blog and after a long time of resisting I finally decided to switch to Word Press! Nucleus was a great system but the mysterious problems recently that kept my blog from appearing on newsfeed fetching sites forced me to go the radical way. After all a blog without any visiting readers is a net corpse!
There are still a couple of things I’m missing from Nucleus but Word Press seems to already have a decent palette of plug-ins and themes and I’m in love with the built-in WYSIWYG-Editor! Publishing a new items seems to be a bit slow however!

If we can believe these rumors originally from mmorpg.com it looks like Star Wars Galaxies is very soon history for Sony Online Entertainment. According to the news Lucas Arts withdraw the SWG license from SOE and gave it to Bioware, the makers of SWKOTOR.
“Bioware did indeed gain rights to develop a second version of SWG. It wont be called SWG2. Its not a completely new game but rather a reworking of existing code.” … sounds vague but I’m curious what Bioware will make of this in case this is going to happen! I hope it will be something like a Pre-CU SWG without bugs and a good portion of true Star Wars feel. And don’t forget to put the Creature Handlers back in! But Bioware would have it easy to make a good game … it’s hard to top a developer like SOE in terms of incompetence and customer dissatisfaction!

Playsyde has published a video of the first 10 minutes playing into Tomb Raider Legends. This is the first time you can really see how the game looks in action and it looks pretty impressive I must say! It seems that Tomb Raider finally grew up (after the unsuccessful TR Angel Of Darkness). The graphic looks stunning and Lara’s movement seems much more natural and smooth than before.
The game is going to be released on 18. April and you can count on a review from Dataleak! Until then check out the official site for more info and preview treats!

What do you need spells for if you got a decent Blaster Rifle?!

According to this forum post on allakhazam.com, the result of Lucas Arts Focus Group discussion about the future of Star Wars Galaxies most participants yelled for a server rollback pre-NGE in unity.

Star Wars Galaxies suffered a huge loss of players in late 2005 because of the NGE total game damage that a certain Julio Torres who thought he might be funny came up with (dataleak reported). Obviously the royals at Lucas Arts and Sony Online Entertainment were envious about the high sale counts of other MMOG’s (WoW) and tried to make Galaxies conforming for dummy players. But somehow Fantasy themes are much more popular than the Star Wars Universe (something I personally will never understand).

Though there is alot of false publicity from SOE and Torres striving in the wild of the official boards and gaming sites about how well the NGE was accepted, it was obvious to them that SWG went nose-dive after the NGE was published. The damage was done!

The question for them is: what to do now? Many of the players left SWG and went over to other MMORPG’s, some of them are happy with it, others think they are a poor replacement for SWG and wish that SWG would come back like it was pre-NGE or even pre-CU. The SWG servers are yawning from emptyness with too few players on them. My once shiny bunker house that I got when pre-ordering Trials Of Obi-Wan surely has thick layers of dust in it’s vaults! How many players would come back to SWG if it would be rolled back and how many of the new post-NGE players who are fine with the current game would leave because of a rollback?

I have managed to not play SWG since the NGE came live (4 months now) but I would resubscribe without a second thought if the game was rolled back, simply because there is no other MMORPG that has the amount of complexity that SWG had before. If I wanted to play a no brainer shooter, I’d use any of the FPS’s out there. WoW is too simple for my taste, the graphics are inferior and the population too childish and besides I totally don’t dig fantasy.