So the project I was working on for my brother fell through, but it's okay, because it was a good excuse to get a lot of practice and remind myself I can still make shit in 3ds max :P
I'm not going to rush out and look for a digm project anytime soon, but if my brother comes to me and needs something now I won't be so scared to try.
As for gaming, I cancelled my WoW subscription for the time being. Running my daily quests was starting to feel like a second job, and my play times weren't very conducive to when everyone else wanted to play. I think my friends that only play very very casually will probably want to come back for patch 4.2, and I think it'd be fun to start raiding a little bit when that happens. I'll definitely resubscribe for that, but for now I'm enjoying a summer break.
The weather is beautiful, I just got my fiancée an early birthday gift (her bike) so we're going to be outside doing that a lot, plus I have a million other games to catch up on. Starcraft II, how I've missed you! And Assassin's Creed is still going well. I can stealth kill the best of 'em. I had a really good long weekend and so far the work week isn't too crazy. The only thing I can complain about right now is that our central air is broken, but I already called our landlord and he's gonna get a repairman out ASAP, so until then it's lots of fans and ice water!
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Thursday, May 12, 2011
WoW vacation
Sorry about my silence, I haven't had a lot of spare WoW time...or gaming time in general. I guess this has been a success though because now I'm taking my "tanking" into the real world. One of the few things that scares me more than tanking/taking a leadership role is doing anything creative/to do with digital media. I'm pretty confident in analytical exercises, the reporting I do for work - writing macros and doing math - budgeting...all of those boring things. Being creative scares the crap out of me because there is no "right" way to do it. Also, since I went to school full time while I worked full time I have horrible confidence about what I learned there, and I feel like all of the other students I graduated with were years ahead of me.
Now I know all of that isn't true, but it's hard to convince myself otherwise. For someone that's usually more logical than necessary, I have issues with that bit of logic. Fortunately my brother is a programmer with a lot of augmented reality experience. He hasn't given up on me yet, and keeps trying to get me to do work for him. I finally finished a prototype of some models he needed, but it's really complicated because I have strict vertex limits, polygon limits, and any animated files need to be .MD2s that require me to use a plugin to export them...plus I only have the trial version now because we're not sure if we need that plugin and there are all sorts of stipulations on that version. Static models need to be .OBJs so that's not too bad, I just hope they all work for him on his end.
I feel a lot better now that they're done (for now) and hopefully after Friday we'll get the go ahead for the full project. Chester and other digm people, get ready for me to contact you in case of emergency!! :P
Now I know all of that isn't true, but it's hard to convince myself otherwise. For someone that's usually more logical than necessary, I have issues with that bit of logic. Fortunately my brother is a programmer with a lot of augmented reality experience. He hasn't given up on me yet, and keeps trying to get me to do work for him. I finally finished a prototype of some models he needed, but it's really complicated because I have strict vertex limits, polygon limits, and any animated files need to be .MD2s that require me to use a plugin to export them...plus I only have the trial version now because we're not sure if we need that plugin and there are all sorts of stipulations on that version. Static models need to be .OBJs so that's not too bad, I just hope they all work for him on his end.
I feel a lot better now that they're done (for now) and hopefully after Friday we'll get the go ahead for the full project. Chester and other digm people, get ready for me to contact you in case of emergency!! :P
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
More socializing, go me!
So today I realized that it's be over a week since the new 5 man instances were released in WoW and I still hadn't run them at all. Unacceptable! I queued up for a random zul instance (Zul'Gurub or Zul'Aman) and waited the 30 or so minutes it took to find the rest of the group.
When I first zoned in I wasn't sure if I was extremely lucky or unlucky. We were assigned Zul'Gurub and I was grouped up with 4 guild mates from another server. 3 of the guildies seemed nice enough but when I asked a simple question about fight mechanics, and no one had the answer, I told them I would look it up fast. One of the guildies said "or /camp" meaning I should just give up now. He immediately got a thumbsdown playerscore from me, lol. I decided I would hang in there anyway and try to be as knowledgeable as possible. I HAD read all of the fight mechanics when the zones came out, but that's a lot to read and remember without ever experiencing them. I try to think the best of people when I first meet them in a random group, but apparently this guy took the opposite approach.
The first boss was pretty challenging. Lots of poison everywhere, literally a poison maze with poison tendrils chasing you, and sometimes you'd get linked to another player and would have to run away from each other to break the chain. We wiped at least 7 times, but were getting close. On one of the later pulls we were SO CLOSE to winning, but the healer went down. I felt like I was going back to EQ2 times, since DKs now have a rez ability. I sacrificed myself and got the healer up, and we downed him! They all thanked me profusely, as some of them didn't even know about the DK change, and the mouthy guild member stopped ragging on me.
I had WoWhead up with all of the boss strategies, so I continued to tell them the strats for the next 3 bosses. We wiped at least once on all of them, but then got it down fairly quickly. One of the guild members had been there before and tried to give strats, but he was dps and didn't inform the tank or healer about any special spells or positioning, but between the two of us we were able to explain everything.
The second to last boss has a fairly simple strategy, but there is a lot of movement and reactionary things that need to happen. We just couldn't down him. We tried at least 20 times, and then tried to move on to the next boss but realized he wouldn't appear until this one was down. We took a 20 min break for food etc and came back to it again. Still no luck, so we ran around the instance and killed anything else we needed for a quest.
In the end we decided to call it, because we were only getting tired and frustrated. It's a shame because they turned out to be a really nice group of people, and I wish I could have finished it with them. I'm rarely social in a group, but in this situation I almost acted like the tank. He was a good tank, but he didn't want to strategize. Fortunately I was up for it, and it makes me think that maybe I will make a good tank someday. When we all decided to leave they said I should transfer servers and group with them more often, heh. I told them that if all of my friends magically stopped playing I'd consider it, and we wished each other good luck. So maybe it wasn't a technical success, but I had fun, and it was definitely worth the time invested.
When I first zoned in I wasn't sure if I was extremely lucky or unlucky. We were assigned Zul'Gurub and I was grouped up with 4 guild mates from another server. 3 of the guildies seemed nice enough but when I asked a simple question about fight mechanics, and no one had the answer, I told them I would look it up fast. One of the guildies said "or /camp" meaning I should just give up now. He immediately got a thumbsdown playerscore from me, lol. I decided I would hang in there anyway and try to be as knowledgeable as possible. I HAD read all of the fight mechanics when the zones came out, but that's a lot to read and remember without ever experiencing them. I try to think the best of people when I first meet them in a random group, but apparently this guy took the opposite approach.
The first boss was pretty challenging. Lots of poison everywhere, literally a poison maze with poison tendrils chasing you, and sometimes you'd get linked to another player and would have to run away from each other to break the chain. We wiped at least 7 times, but were getting close. On one of the later pulls we were SO CLOSE to winning, but the healer went down. I felt like I was going back to EQ2 times, since DKs now have a rez ability. I sacrificed myself and got the healer up, and we downed him! They all thanked me profusely, as some of them didn't even know about the DK change, and the mouthy guild member stopped ragging on me.
I had WoWhead up with all of the boss strategies, so I continued to tell them the strats for the next 3 bosses. We wiped at least once on all of them, but then got it down fairly quickly. One of the guild members had been there before and tried to give strats, but he was dps and didn't inform the tank or healer about any special spells or positioning, but between the two of us we were able to explain everything.
The second to last boss has a fairly simple strategy, but there is a lot of movement and reactionary things that need to happen. We just couldn't down him. We tried at least 20 times, and then tried to move on to the next boss but realized he wouldn't appear until this one was down. We took a 20 min break for food etc and came back to it again. Still no luck, so we ran around the instance and killed anything else we needed for a quest.
In the end we decided to call it, because we were only getting tired and frustrated. It's a shame because they turned out to be a really nice group of people, and I wish I could have finished it with them. I'm rarely social in a group, but in this situation I almost acted like the tank. He was a good tank, but he didn't want to strategize. Fortunately I was up for it, and it makes me think that maybe I will make a good tank someday. When we all decided to leave they said I should transfer servers and group with them more often, heh. I told them that if all of my friends magically stopped playing I'd consider it, and we wished each other good luck. So maybe it wasn't a technical success, but I had fun, and it was definitely worth the time invested.
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