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!
Wookiepedia, a Wiki solely dedicated to the Star Wars universe! How nice to see that some people have already been very busy filling the database with tons and tons of background info on Star Wars related things. Ever wanted to know how Bossk’s ship looks, why Yuuzahn Vong are such a fearsome species or what the name of the asteroid is where Luke and Leia were born? It’s all in there! They even have listed many of the source books of the Star Wars D6 and D20 Pen & Paper Roleplaying games. With all those loads of information it becomes clear that the movies are only a small fragment of what makes the Star Wars Universe so intricate and vast!
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!
I’ve been playing Star Wars Galaxies on and off for about three years so by the time a large amount of screenshots have been piled up on my harddisk. And because it’s a good opportunity, here’s a little
memorial gallery for SWG, the game that once was a hell lot of fun. There were many nice times playing, hunting, flying, taming and crafting around in the galaxy and it still hurts a bit that the game since a while is gone as we know it.
Maybe there will be a time when a new and similar good MMORPG appears, maybe even a SWG2, who knows?! Whats left until then is good memories and a crapload of screenshots. I’ve picked some of the more interesting from my collection and made a retrospective to show some of the things that others eventually might not find in any of the other popular MMOG’s.
(Caution: Large amount of image data ahead!) …
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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!
If you’re one of the users who would like to see something done about Flash’s neglected sound situation in future then I recommend you to visit the Adobe Labs forum for Flash Player 8.5! there is a thread going on about a sound object request in Flash 8.5+.
Wouldn’t it be cool to really program audio in Flash instead of just using lifeless MP3 or Wav/Aiff streams?!
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.
I am happy to announce the opening of the Flash Game Programming Wiki, a Wiki that is dedicated to the development and programming of games with Flash! The idea for it raised a while after I discovered the Game Programming Wiki, a site that is dedicated to general game programming but doesn’t mention Flash or ActionScript at all.
The FGPWiki is still brandnew and fresh and therefore needs your help with filling it with content. So if you’re one of us Flash game programmers and like to submit, feel free to do so. I will update the site more and more over the next couple of weeks. I hope this will become a huge and freely accessible pool with lots of valueful information for all (aspriring) Flash game writers!
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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A development blog about a racing game done in Flash! Some interesting posts there, one about AI for computer controlled racing cars. It seems they will update their blog as development progresses so I will put it on my watch list. I still keep the idea in the back of my mind about writing a ‘view from above’ racing game like Super Cars or Micro Machines.
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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The coolest commercial I’ve seen since a long time …. http://www.bigad.com.au/! No, it won’t hurt your system, despite the security warning that shows up eventually, but this is so freakin cool!
