2007-02-26

Muddy Reflections rejected

Filed under: Writing — Tags: — D. Moonfire @ 22:08

Well, it was right in the 8-10 weeks range, but I think this pretty much says it all.

I hope this finds you well. Thanks for submitting your manuscript Muddy Reflections for consideration in the Five Star SF/Fantasy line. While we enjoyed what we had read, unfortunately, ours is a very narrow market, and I’m afraid that your novel just doesn’t quite suit our needs at this time. Thanks again for the opportunity to review it, and good luck with your writing.

Sad and disappointing, to say the least. I had such high hopes of Muddy Reflections getting through, since it sounded like something right in their focal area. But, in this case, it just wasn’t and that’s the nature of the beast.

Squid and Knitting

Filed under: Uncategorized — D. Moonfire @ 21:41

Since I know a few people actually like squids and knitting.

A weekend of burnout and reading books.

Filed under: Family, Games, Programming, Technology — Tags: — D. Moonfire @ 15:36

It was an interesting weekend. I ended up being slightly burned out, so I read three books (WebMage, Dykstra’s War, and The Ice Limit) which I’ll probably make reviews out of in the next week. Ended up being about a thousand pages read, including the beginning of an economics paper on MMORPG’s. Also played about eight hours of Wild Arms 4. I did a hint of work on my tag cloud extension for MediaWiki.

Been rather stressed in general. I’m considering some major lifestyle changes in the next few weeks which is causing me a great deal of stress. On the other hand, its Fluffy’s birthday today. So, I’m going to ignore stress for the evening and just spend some time with them.

2007-02-23

Online Map of Creation

Filed under: Games — Tags: , — D. Moonfire @ 14:42

Yep, I got it up and running last night. Took a lot of hours and I don’t have anywhere near enough markers in yet, still working on the file formats and all that lovely stuff, but the proof of concept is in and I’m feeling a pretty good high from it.

I even took that scary step and sent an email to stephenls and asked if they would be willing to let me put their map online. It’s okay if they say no, but I won’t know until I tried. It will mean I’ll need to create a database of every location in Creation, along with their coordinates, but that’s another project I think the community could use if they don’t already have it.

2007-02-22

Creation is not square

Filed under: Games — Tags: , , , — D. Moonfire @ 15:21

I know that sounds strange, but the Exalted world of Creation simply isn’t square. In the process of trying to figure out how to get a Google Map to work with Creation, I made some interesting observations. The earth is square, at least when you use a projection to make it square. The World of Warcraft is square, judging from the online map of that world. The world of Oblivion is square. Lots of fantasy worlds are simply… square. Most worlds are created on a piece of paper and square is just a natural shape. For some, they don’t want to deal with the curvature of a planet, so they make it a “flat” world and I noticed most flat worlds are… square. Creation, on the other hand, was crafted to fit as the cover of Exalted, two pages side by side. So, naturally, it is more of a rectangle that isn’t square. I will admit, I don’t like flat worlds, there are so many little details that you have to think of, such as line of sight, horizon issues, and simple navigation. An anime banner in Exalted really should be visible for hundreds of miles, its a flat world and a bright enough light would be visible up to thousands of miles, even if just a haze.

(more…)

2007-02-20

Fantasy Worlds, Google, and Maps

Filed under: Games — Tags: , , — D. Moonfire @ 17:02

I’ve been somewhat frustrated with my map of Creation along with the other worlds I’m greatly interesting in making maps for. The map of Creation looks pretty good, but it continues to fail me in that I can’t get the level of detail without making the entire map so large that my computer is simply unable to handle it. According to what I found, Creation is suppose to be 13,200 by 8,266 miles in size. My map of Creation, which uses the same sizes as stephenls’ map, is 3,840 by 2,303 pixels. If I increase the dimensions by 4 I would get roughly 1 pixel per mile of Creation. At the expense of pretty needing a 4 GB machine to handle the sheer amount of raw data. I found a way that gets around this that lets me add on data as I go without needing me to do a 1px/mile detail.

(more…)

2007-02-19

Opinions on Oblivion

Filed under: Games — D. Moonfire @ 16:58

I finished Oblivion, and overall, I really enjoyed the game. The game was pretty, it looked great on a 22″ widescreen monitor, had a smooth and addicting gameplay. Its only draw backs is that the main plot got a tad tedious near the middle and end. Also, my normal approach of power leveling to make the fights “not a challenge” didn’t go very well because the world scaled. I hate games that scale. The defense was not to sleep, you basically get the effects of leveling (minus hit points) without letting other creatures level up. I think something like the Oblivion Overhaul would work better so you have areas that are actually a challenge until you level up.

(more…)

Burn Out, Complete Clothier, and Being Sick

Filed under: Family, Games — Tags: — D. Moonfire @ 15:25

I canceled gaming this weekend because I’ve been burning out my creativity trying to get this project done for Complete Clothier. By Thursday, I was having trouble finding the energy to get into my car to head home, much less plan for an adventure, potential mass combat scenario, and seven players going in nine directions. Normally, this would excite me to no end which is why I love running games. One of the indications is my inability to focus on two things at once. Normally, I’m working on a story, game, or some other idea in the back of my head almost constantly. Sometimes, a few more. I don’t watch TV, I watch TV while writing up ideas. But, the more burned out I am, the more I have to drop the “other” projects and just focus on a single thing. This last week has been like that. Its a bit better now, but this week is going to be hell for getting everything done by the 23rd. That is the so-called “code freeze” date. We already passed the “feature freeze,” but I suspect my boss won’t listen to that. :)

(more…)

2007-02-13

GenCon and New Projects

Filed under: Games — D. Moonfire @ 16:15

As cool as the idea for writing a game in Oblivion is, I don’t think I have the skills needed to do it. I could probably come up with the thousand or so NPCs, a ton of plots, factions, back history, and world fluff, but I can’t do the graphics. So, that gets shoved back into the “it would be cool” list and I’ll try to focus on the things I want to focus on, such as writing. I don’t know what it is about programming, but it makes me want to write a game so badly, mainly because I enjoy games so much.

I had a horrible time registering for GenCon hotels this time. I was only two hours after the opening and there were only three hotels still left open (from two pages worth of hotels). I didn’t get my favorite hotel this time, but hopeful I didn’t get too bad of a hotel. Thought, the 4-5 block will be annoying if I’m carrying stuff. Oh well. You’d think that a convention with so many different people would have more hotel blocks open, but apparently not. Of course, you also hear about people complaining about not being to get all 3, 4, 6 rooms they were trying to get. I wanted one, just one. At least I got it, and a walk won’t kill me.

2007-02-12

Oblivion, 4E6, NaNoMo, and GenCon

Filed under: Games, Writing — Tags: — D. Moonfire @ 16:47

Yeah, I pretty much played Oblivion all weekend. I should have done something more productive, such as writing or whatever, but with Fluffy still out of town, I really wasn’t in the mood for doing anything at all. So, I closed Oblivion gates, power-leveled in a game you don’t have to power level and just enjoyed closing off quests and plots.

Then, it happened. Like all computer games I play, I started to see how they wrote it. Little formulas, tibits of code, how they got the graphics to drop into the game or even how they were linked. I have a couple mods already (um, like 20, but only four are cheats), and from how the mods were written I saw how I could do a mod.

In itself, the idea of a mod is really cool, but it didn’t take long before I realized that I could create an entire world in Oblivion, using their engine but my ideas. The whole idea came from a civilization underground, terrified of the surface. Sort of a more cheerful Seventh Level (which I can’t find a link for), I guess. Oh, with fantasy and magic, of course. This grand, but probably impossible for me alone, idea created a new world, politics, and even species interactions. I thought it was a really cool idea.

However, it would takes everything I had for a while to finish it. That means no 4E6 or NaNoMo this year, plus I really should finish my Exalted projects first. But, if 4E6 isn’t my thing this year (I haven’t seen what the elements are), I might consider doing that instead to “write a game” but not to worry about the 3D graphics and programming stuff. And I could start small, which means I have a reasonable “end” point.

It has promise.

I could do NaNoMo anyways, I already have the novel planned but not started. Since it is going to be a “short” novel, I was going to write something called the “Ninth Wife” which would be an Exalted novel. Fortunately, I have so many other projects, I don’t have time to start it which would make it perfect for NaNoMo.

In other news, I’m going to submit an pair of events for GenCon this year. I wanted to do an Exalted adventure, since there was a distinct lack of Exalted goodness last year. Talking to uteck, I think it might be a two-parter with the first part being optional. I think the first might use the Mass Combat rules of Exalted and the second is the more personal attacking of Anathema. It sounds like it might be a lot of fun and really encourages the party to work together. We’ll probably have to playtest it at least once during gaming (or an off-gaming weekend).

Older Posts »