Shamus Plays WoW, Part 6:
Overwhelmed by Kobolds

By Shamus Posted Thursday Dec 2, 2010

Filed under: Column 88 comments

I’ve been forgetting to link to this lately. Here is the entry from last week:

Shamus Plays WoW 5: Another Day, Another Mine

And yesterday:

Shamus Plays WoW 6: Overwhelmed by Kobolds

Next week, Cataclysm launches!

Although…

Am I the only one who is wondering what the selling point of Cataclysm is going to be? I mean, everyone gets the new Azeroth. Everyone gets access to the new class / race combinations. (I think 95% of all players just rolled Human hunters. The other 5% rolled Night Elf mages.) What does the expansion offer, besides the ability to be a Worgen or Goblin. Don’t get me wrong, those are pretty cool. But I don’t know if they’re $40 worth of cool. Especially with so much other new content to explore. Maybe there is other content in the expansion, but Blizzard is doing an uncharacteristically poor job of tantalizing me with them.

 


 

Project Hex Part 6 – A Comment on Comments

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Dec 1, 2010

Filed under: Programming 159 comments

If you remember from last time, I’ve got a bug in my program. It’s supposed to look at the terrain and determine which way is downhill, and it’s coming up with the wrong answer. Sometimes.

I’m going to post a block of code directly from the project. This is the top of the file called Hex.cpp:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Hex Part 6 – A Comment on Comments”

 


 

Stolen Pixels #245: Tycho Brahe

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Nov 30, 2010

Filed under: Column 53 comments

You show up in a videogame, you end up in my comic. Those are the rules and there’s no sense crying about it now.

I’ve said before that I find the 3-panel joke to be one of the more challenging. I’m actually toying with the idea of doing a few, just for the sake of variety.

 


 

Let’s Code, Part 2

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Nov 30, 2010

Filed under: Links 37 comments

Part 2 of Michael Goodfellow’s game-building series is now available. He’s tweaking the site in response to feedback, adding RSS feed, making clear the goals of the project, and generally learning to blog while making a game.

This week he’s working on collision detection, one of my weak areas. (My other major weakness is animating skeletal meshes – making characters walk and such. Hate that stuff. It’s one of those jobs that is hard to break down into manageable bits of complexity.) It’s difficult to get it working, and even harder to get it really, truly right. A slight misstep can burn a ton of precious CPU time, and no matter how long I work on it or how well it works I’m always left with the nagging impression that I’m probably missing something.

 


 

Postcards from WoW, Part 7

By Shamus Posted Monday Nov 29, 2010

Filed under: Pictures 133 comments

Okay, I need to do some more work on my WoW series, so it’s time to get back into the game again. I should check up on my main character and see where I left off. And this is where I discover I have a Serious Problem. This problem leads me to Google, which leads me to forum threads. I think the behavior of WoW forum posters is well-known, but in case you’ve missed that particular aspect of internet culture, I will add some of that flavor to this post.

pfwow7_dalaran.jpg

The problem is this: Dalaran is the major end-game city. From there, you can teleport to any of the other racial cities in the game. The common wisdom among players was to have a high-level character teleport you to Dalaran, which you could then set as your home. You could then use your hearthstone to jump back to Dalaran at any time, and from there teleport to the city of your choice. It was a great time-saver.

But this weekend I logged in to find this:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Postcards from WoW, Part 7”

 


 

Reginald Cuftbert Smashed My Computer

By Shamus Posted Sunday Nov 28, 2010

Filed under: Notices 60 comments

Josh had his computer stop working on him this week. Something about a fan that stopped working, or overheated, or was possessed by demons, or whatever. You know how it is with 64-bit hardware. So now Josh is scrambling to get replacement parts and having them express-shipped to him so he can rebuild his machine. As a result of all this, there might not be Spoiler Warning this week. I know, I know. We just got the new season rolling and were getting into the groove.

While a week with no Spoiler Warning seem grim, I hope you’ll remember who the real victim is here: Me. I have no idea what I’m going to do for blog content this week. I suppose I could write more posts, but I’m way too busy playing World of Warcraft on my fully functional computer for that sort of business.

But thanks for your concern. I’m sure I’ll get through this somehow.

 


 

OK Go – White Knuckles

By Shamus Posted Saturday Nov 27, 2010

Filed under: Movies 37 comments

OK Go:


Link (YouTube)

All one take. With animals.

I don’t know what made these men so insane, but I hope they’re never cured. Nice work guys.