"Chaotic Neutral"

Or how to completely destroy a popular MMORPG
I’ve been a Star Wars fan for a long time, I remember since 1983 when I still was a kid and went to the movie theater with a mate to see Return of the Jedi. I wouldn’t say I’m an overly fanatic fan but I always liked the sheer depth and complexity of the expanded Star Wars Universe. Every other Science Fiction looks like bland second class compared to Star Wars!
So when I first heard about the news of a Star Wars MMORPG in development some years ago I was hooked! In late summer 2003 Sony Online Entertainment let their Star Wars Galaxies go live and I’ve ordered it one or two months later. The game already offered a lot in its early time but it also has been a problem child since the very beginning because of many bugs and gameplay flaws. SOE released the game into public with many bugs not being fixed and this method went on for most of the time when they published a new update or expansion for the game. After a while you could be sure that with every major publish a bunch of new bugs came into the game. A MMORPG is a complex matter with many server/client relations where unprepared issues can occur but some of the bugs were so absurd that I started to wonder how the coding organization looked at SOE. Either they didn’t follow a well planned object oriented design or their organization structure was simply chaotic.
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I’ve bought myself an iPod Shuffle finally after pondering about a couple of mobile players. This device is the second best thing after sliced bread.
I don’t wanna dig to deep in details here so I make it short, here are the pro’s of the iPod Shuffle …

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As a one-man-game developer of worldclass (exaggeration intended!) it’s good to have a bunch of tools at hand that help with the tasks for creating games! In this series I will introduce helpful ‘nice to have’ or even ‘must have’ tools that make a game developers/designers day easier. In this part I will cover Alias SketchBook Pro …

I’ve bought myself a periphery some days ago about which I was pondering to buy for a long time already, a Wacom Intuos 3 graphics tablet! I choose the smallest version 4×5 since I’m not a drawing pro and have limited desktop real estate and the smallest one suffices pretty well for just some sketching.

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More funny stuff from the GTA front, check out www.videogamesareevil.com! Aah I love it when people get cynical! And if you are up to more fun in the same direction, watch the vids at www.purepwnage.com, for example Meet FPS Doug!

From the good old days of low-res pixeling to todays high resolution blood

Videogame violence anno 1984 - Jack The Ripper (C64) ...

Sex and violence was a topic in video games since the early days of computer game history. Some people might not have realized it but there was always an urge to use forbidden topics in a virtual scenario not just since recently. Even among the first text adventures were subjects with quite a lot of (fictional) violence and blood. Remember The Lurking Horror from Infocom, a horror text adventure or Jack The Ripper which already introduced some graphical images of violence.

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Due to popular demand I’ve put these two JSFL scripts back up again. They are useful for renaming and organizing items in Flash’ Library Panel.

Library Items Renamer v1.2
With LIR you are able to rename a selection of items in the library and set other options like exporting for AS, update them etc. Here are the features …
- Can rename a selection of files in the library to have a new name and a number suffix. For example clip_1, clip_2, clip_3 …
- You are able to only use numbers as names.
- By default numbers start at zero but you can set the suffix number to any beginning value you like.
- Leading zeroes can be used. They are supported up to 4 digits long values.
- Exporting for ActionScript can be toggled on/off.
- Export into first frame can be toggled on/off.
- AS2.0 Linkage Class Name can be set (and removed).
- Renamed items can be moved to a new folder.
- Leaving the Name field empty will only change the other settings, not the Name.
- Items can be updated.
- Export- and Class-settings only affect items of the type ‘movie clip’, ‘graphic’, ‘button’, ‘font’, ’sound’ and ‘component’, while ‘bitmaps’, ‘videos’ and ‘compiled clips’ still can be renamed/moved/updated.
Download Library Items Renamer v1.2

Convert All To Clips v1.0
CATC can convert a selection of items in the library to movieclips, symbols or buttons. Helpful when many items (i.e. bitmaps) needs to be converted. The features are …
- Converts a selection of items in the library to symbols, either movie clips, buttons or graphic symbols.
- The registration point can be set.
- A name prefix can be set.
- Leading zeroes can be used to keep the correct order of the items after conversion.
- Name of the destination folder can be set.
Download Convert All To Clips v1.0

Both files come as a Macromedia MXP format and require the Macromedia Extension Manager for installing.