Sunday, July 20th, 2008
In this tutorial I will explain how to create a relatively realistic looking galaxy with Photoshop. I was searching the web up- and downwards to find any tutorials that could tell me how to get a similar fantastic result. There are like 100.000 planet tutorials out there and the few tutorials which were about creating a galaxy where either very basic or the result looked like everything but a realistic galaxy. The galaxy I wanted should have looked massive and intricate … just like the real ones but with a slightly more artistic touch. I’ve needed a galaxy that I could use as a star map for a space-themed roleplaying game design and the image you see above is a part of the result. Let’s go try to do such one …
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Wednesday, July 26th, 2006
So after about six months of absence I’ve decided to subscribe for a month back into SWG to see if things changed for the better (and to see if my stuff still exists). I spawned inside my house where I left the game last November and decided to bring my char to level 90 so I did many of the quests that I still had open. After all quests are almost the only way currently to gain XP quickly.
The game is basically still the same since I left it! Many of the same old bugs and a gameplay that has only distantly something to do with RPG. Examples: Tried to continue the ‘Secret of the Syrens’ quest but the Black Sun Bunker at the waypoint never spawns,I want to call my mount pet inside the Kashyyk Hunting Grounds but it doesn’t spawn, I want to attack that imperial trooper that permanently shoots at me but I can’t because he’s stuck inside a wall … the list could go on for a while.
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Sunday, May 14th, 2006
… I’m not talking about fun with playing the NGE mind you … when the NGE came live there was a lot of derision and mockery on the official forums. Among all this down pour of anger, hate and dismay about the NGE there were a handful cynical postings of how scenes in the Star Wars movies would look if the NGE had affected them. Because they were so utterly hilarious I decided to save them for later and what better opportunity do I have than to post them here for people who have missed them. In this sense read on and enjoy! 
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Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006
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!
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Monday, March 20th, 2006
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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Friday, March 10th, 2006
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.
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Friday, November 18th, 2005
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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Monday, March 8th, 2004
Review: Sentinel Worlds 1: Future Magic (DOS/C64)
One of my very favorite games back on Amiga was the space RPG Hard Nova (to be reviewed in a while) which took me long cozy winter nights to solve. The predecessor of Hard Nova was a game called Sentinel Worlds 1: Future Magic which was released in 1988 by Electronic Arts and had it’s success under science fiction RPG videogamers. Me - PC-less - always looked enviously over to the PC crowd. But that only until decent DOS Emulators were developed, like DOSBox.
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Saturday, October 11th, 2003
About four years ago there was a game in development that I highly anticipated but that never actually got released. The now disbanded software company Psygnosis was about to develop a new 3D version of their 16bit classic Hired Guns.
I remember playing Hired Guns back on Amiga and while the Gameplay wasn’t anything particularly new, the game had a nice and dark futuristic atmosphere with it.
The idea of the sequel was to only take four of the characters of the old version into the game that can be played together as a team and the Gameplay running on the unreal engine should have an impact on strategic team play, not just wild shooting.
I’ve lost Psygnosis’ path then and didn’t knew what happened to stop the developing on this game. Might be that they had to give up when they dissolved.
What makes me wondering is that this nice gaming idea wasn’t sold and continued by someone else!
There’s still a preview existing on ign.com but no information about why the game got discontinued.
If you know more, please feel free to drop a comment on that.
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Sunday, September 7th, 2003
Review: Star Wars Galaxies (PC)First of all I’m not that far yet and played this game now for one week so you will not get any too detailed information about it here. I’ve spent most of the recent days training my character in the Tyrena area on Corellia an finally got my pistol skill tree full being able to call myself a pistol apprentice. I thought I would be able to hop right on the novice smugglers skill trees but to my surprise I still have to get some more skill points in at least pistol ranged combat before I can do that.
I’ve started off with an artisan and did the tedious task of surveying and sampling ore, minerals and chemicals for a long time with the intention to manufacture my own (better) weapons, since these seem to be very rare (at least on the Chilastra server?!), even bought and planted some personal mineral extractors later but got bored with it and decided to get onto the adventurous side with the rebels. Gladly I’ve already worked my pistol skills up a lot to that time. So after doing rebel delivery and destroy missions until I’ve got 200 rebel faction points to join them and hanging around on Corellia for almost one week I’ve decided it’s time to take a flight to Tatooine.
Shortly after I arrived in Mos Espa, I’ve grouped with a Trandoshan and a Bothan who asked me to join to raid Fort Tusken which lies close to that area. Three persons are way to few to raid the Tuskens but we thought to find others on that location to team up.
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