Category: Games

Game shareware utility programs or discussions on gaming topics.

Flying Carpet Mount

As a Warlock, my armor is cloth, so it is natural for me to have the tailoring skill. One of the exclusive benefits for Tailors is the ability to build a Flying Carpet. I have increased my Tailoring skill to 300+ and have been able to tailor a Flying Carpet mount. I had quite a bit of help from my Death Knight brother who helped with farming the cloth, and buying the other materials from the auction house. The Arcane Dust required is readily available, but the Golden Draenite is rare and quite expensive. Four Golden Draenite items are needed for the glowing globes at each corner of the carpet. Continue reading “Flying Carpet Mount”

Wow Mercenaries?

Level 23 Priest

The Problem
Wow classes are not balanced for PVE soloing. I’m not suggesting that they aren’t balanced for other efforts or that they should be changed, but as we all know, some classes have a real problem soloing in PVE.

Some Background
I’m not a whiner, and I’ve been playing MMOs for over 5 years, so I have some experience beyond Wow. Here in Wow, in the past few months, I have played all the classes and studied the wiki guides.
Let’s look at the biggest example you are all familiar with: The Priest. The priest is the squishiest of the classes. I’m sure it’s possible to solo the priest in PVE. I’ve gotten a priest up to level 20, but it’s no fun. It’s a lot of work to solo a priest. The mental and input “load” is very high. Many different skills are required and everything needs to go just right to take down mobs, even if you are a few levels higher than they are. And if two mobs run you at the same time, forget it. You are in for a long walk from the graveyard. Continue reading “Wow Mercenaries?”

Test Stencylworks Game

Test Stencylworks game on Android.

Balloons Enhanced

This is an enhanced version of a tutorial game provided with Stencylworks. The enhancements are to add a scene with more balloons and to add a 5 second frame rate measurement.

The desktop shows 60 fps. I see my Android Asus Transformer getting 30 FPS, which is apparently the setting for Flash on this platform. Go Nvidia Tegra 2 ! Looks like Stencylworks is just fine to make games for Android.. What are we waiting for?

-windy

 

 

Wow – Death Knight Class – Early Experience

Death Knight Night Elf at 61

Once you level at least one character in your account to level 55, you can create Death Knight class characters of any Race on any Realm. Death Knights start at level 55, so all the drudgery of getting to level 55 is eliminated, but there are other problems to deal with. There are many notable experiences and problems for a Death Knight:

  • While you start at level 55, you have only 20 silver in your bank.
  • The starting quest chain is a tight story line, which is exciting and engaging. While it is not as rich with cinematics and dialog as the Undead quest chain in the Silverpine forest, it leads you through a story that places you in the world and fills in your back story.
  • You will find yourself at level 58 with an updated weapon and some new armor pieces when the quest chain ends.
  • The story ends differently for Horde and Alliance based on your race. But I’ll not spoil your experience by telling you the end.
  • Your only starting profession is First Aid and it is leveled for you to about level 200, so you can built quite nice bandages should you need them. Continue reading “Wow – Death Knight Class – Early Experience”

Battle Chair Design – Revision 1

Front View

When used for gaming, laptops tend to over heat, and eventually they destroy their video cards. My Alienware m15x laptop, while it seems to have good cooling, has had 4 new video cards in the last 3 years. I have wanted to use a desktop for gaming, but prefer to do most of my playing from the comfort of my recliner. Here is the start of an idea to accomplish that. Missing from the renderings are the arm that holds the monitor from the case to the right of the recliner to the monitor in front of me. As  you can see the computer case is very large. I’ve provided for a UPS in the cabinet since in my area all my computers require a UPS due to frequent power glitches that would cause an unprotected computer to reboot. Click on pictures for larger views. Continue reading “Battle Chair Design – Revision 1”

Wow – Realm Design Has Problems

World of Warcraft

I have recently been playing World of Warcraft. While the game has much to recommend it, especially since they have a trial or starter edition that is free-to-play [up to level 20], it has a serious problem with its design of “realms” or “shards” as some games call it.

“Shards” or “Realms” of course is the name used  for the “instances” of the server that are required to support very large numbers of players. These games are MMO – Massively Multi-Player – and “Persistent” which means that they do not place players in private “instances” of the game as they play. But it is not possible to have hundreds of thousands of players all playing in the same server at the time. How is the game going to solve the problem when thousands of players show up in the same town at the same time for a party or just to hang out on a Saturday night?

Well the point is that World of Warcraft solves this problem very badly. There are better solutions out there. Let’s look at the Wow solution and then look at some other games and see much better solutions. Continue reading “Wow – Realm Design Has Problems”

TomTom – Wow Addon for Mapping

World of Warcraft has a free to play starter edition with restrictions. Some are:

  • No Trading. They are preventing trial accounts from being used as farmers apparently.
  • Can’t invite players to Groups [Parties].
  • Can’t whisper unless they are a friend.
  • Can’t use mailbox. Again the farming problem.
  • Not all races are available.
  • Characters are capped at level 20 out of 85.

But you can have up to 10 characters per account so you can explore a lot of the world and figure out how things work.

Add Ons EcoSystem

World of Warcraft has a huge ecosystem of AddOns that add and change functions of the program. I needed a way to see my coordinates on the map to match up with quest descriptions. There are a ton of map addons so I chose a simple one. You can find TomTom here and comment on it here.

Compass without TomTom
Compass with TomTom

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s the compass of Wow without TomTom – Where Am I? With TomTom no problem I get the coords at the bottom. Continue reading “TomTom – Wow Addon for Mapping”