roncli.com blog

Remember PXO? If so, you probably remember some people who loved their aliases, often griefing people to no end.

For fun, I compiled a list of pilots along with their possible aliases from a period of about a year. I ran an IRC bot on the PXO's server and tracked every person that entered a channel. The bot was hidden because it never actually joined a channel, but it could use standard IRC commands to see who was in what channel and to get additional information about them. Yes, I was a sneaky bastard.

It served no real purpose. This was back in the days when I was cynical and bored, and had nothing better to code. Oh, the days. So anyway, I figured I'd at least share the information I collected, and you can go back and laugh at the good old days.

Oh, if only there was a Descent 4.

Labels: Games

Monday, July 28, 2008

The Joys of Being a Guild Master
Posted: 2:18:00 PM 0 comments

As many of you have either been told or otherwise found out, I run a guild in World of Warcraft on Korialstrasz called Six Minutes To Release, a play on the message you receive when you die (6 minutes until release). Solitha helps me run it, and I think that together we do a pretty decent job of it. That's not to say that it doesn't come without it's stresses.

Internet drama is something you can't get away from, no matter how hard you try. Minimizing the effects of it has proven to be an interesting challenge this far. Whether it be two people fighting over something not related to the game, that one player everyone seems to hate, or the player that you wonder when they're going to go emo on you and suddenly bail out of the guild someday.

Then there's making sure everyone is happy with their raiding schedule, which in and of itself is a fun challenge. The people playing alts because we don't have two of three people of a particular class on want to play their mains, so it's hard to balance people's wants with the guild needs. Then what do you do when you're short a few players? PuGing is a great source of finding raiders, but out goal is to be able to run the raids within our guild, and when you're as far out as we are from doing so, finding regular PuGers that know what they are doing can me impossible.

And of course there's running the raids themselves. Our guild had been easily clearing Karazhan for months, and it seems that these last few weeks we've just been unable to focus enough to get full clears. It's difficult to see where things are going wrong sometimes, and that makes running raids particularly frustrating.

The rewarding part is seeing our guild grow, working together better, and starting to see some real progress, both among the players and the guild as a whole.

Black Temple before the patch seems pretty unreasonable at this point, but I think that once we get into 25-man content, we'll start rolling pretty good.

Posted with LifeCast

Labels: Games

Thursday, March 01, 2007

New Computer = Better Gaming
Posted: 4:28:00 PM 0 comments

Having had Ox running for about a week now, I can say that the new system officially kicks ass. I am playing World of Warcraft at 1920 by 1440, and it's playing better than on Successor running at 1024 by 768. I still have yet to give it a whirl with Descent 3, but so far, gaming's never been better.

One of the games I need to try is one I bought a few months ago, GTR2. It's a GT Racing simulator that doesn't work with a Radeon 8500, which is what my old card was. I now have an x1950 which should make the game run really smoothly, and hopefully do so at large resolutions as well.

The main reason I got GTR2 was that I liked the original GTR a lot. The graphics and realism in the game are amazing. I've always liked racing, as my father and uncle were both race car drivers back when I was a child. Though it's never equated to me running real cars, the virtual kind have always been exciting for me. Never do I race those snazzy 5-minute races, it has to be the full 500 miles or 3 hours or whatever length it happens to be.

In any case, I'll be setting this game up this weekend and trying my hand at some more racing. At least now with a large hard drive (160 GB), I don't have to worry about running out of space for a while.

Labels: Games

Friday, December 15, 2006

WoW: wow.
Posted: 3:51:00 PM 0 comments

I finally got around to trying World of Warcraft. After purchasing and installing the 5 disk set, I got to playing. My opening thoughts on this game: wow.

First of all, when they call this a massive multiplayer online RPG, they mean MASSIVE. This world is HUGE! I've been playing for three weeks now, and I've maybe explored 20% of the game. This has its pluses and minuses. The obvious plus is the fact that they can stuff anything and everything into this game, because they have the space to do it. The minus is that it takes for freaking ever to get anywhere. Even with the various methods of travelling, you're looking at five to fifteen minutes to get from one zone to the next, assuming you're not sitting around the gryphons the whole time. It's absolutely epic, though. The detail is astounding, the cities are very well designed, and the environments are very atmospheric.

Secondly, the combat system isn't just hack and slash (although some of the quests can make you think so), as much of the game is based on team play. There is some actual strategy required to keep yourself alive, you can't just go into an area and expect to kill everything just because you're five levels higher than they are. Chances are they're either elites, or there's a large group of them waiting to mob you to death. Further, there are "buffs" and "debuffs" that improve or hinder your character, and the debuffs may or may not be able to be cured. Debuffs include stunning, paralysis, freezing (so you can't move), chilled (so you move slower), and a wide variety of poisons, diseases, and curses. Now, it's nowhere near as extensive as, say, Achaea is as far as their dozens of afflictions, but it is more than just "I hit you for 20, you hit me for 6, etc. etc. etc.".

There are various professions that you can take up that you can use to make your character gold. It seems pretty boring, but you can get into the cycle where you do your grinding (WoW's term for bashing) and collecting, and then you do your creating, shopping, repairing, and all the other miscellaneous things you need to do while you're in a major city.

There's no player-driven politics, but they do have guilds where people can get together for chat, help, forming groups, etc. This can be one of the more rewarding aspects of the game, as you actually get to interact as part of a team, which is a lot of fun.

Overall, I find it fun to play, and haven't run into the negative stereotypes I've heard about the players. 99.9% of the players I find are fun to play with.

You can check out the information on my two characters on Thottbot.

Labels: Games

Saturday, November 26, 2005

Track 7 Still Rules
Posted: 8:37:00 PM 0 comments

It's been 5 years since I last played San Francisco Rush 2049's Track 7... It's only on the Tournament and Special editions. Well, I was lucky enough to find a machine downtown and played today for about 3 hours. Too many kids, though, I probably won't be going back. My only hope will be finding somewhere else that has it and play there.

I did about a 5'12", 14 seconds off my time from when I played it last at Starbase near San Francisco.

Labels: Games

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

0-0-0+
Posted: 12:36:00 AM 0 comments

I just think it's a cool move. Meant for defense, you can really demoralize your opponent by castling queen-side while at the same time putting them in check with your rook.

After playing a few games at work, I may actually be getting back into chess again.

Labels: Games

Friday, November 04, 2005

TopCoder
Posted: 12:57:00 AM 0 comments

In my search for All Things Google, I found out about something they do yearly called the "Code Jam", which uses software based on the competitions that take place at TopCoder. It's actually a pretty neat site that takes coders and pits them in a competition of speed, accuracy, and problem solving. There's also ways to make money off the site by involving yourself with projects that they will eventually sell to people. It's not a bad deal, if you code in C++, Java, C#, or VB.Net, drop by and check it out.

Labels: Games

Thursday, May 12, 2005

GTR is officially badass
Posted: 3:39:00 PM 0 comments

Now playing: Dr Stephen Baysted - GTR_Trance_2 (5:59)

Got to playing a lot more GTR lately, and took my first checkered flag. Granted, damage is off, a bunch of assists are on, and the AI is at 90%. I swear I'm doing something wrong tho.. I have to pit every 35 minutes or so, because I go through tires like a hot knife through butter. I pit about 3 times for every 2 times the AI pits.

In any case, I'm going to go through the championship at this point and try to get a feel for the tracks. I am pretty solid at Barcelona now, but I'm going to suck at the others for the first couple hours or so. I'm doing pretty good in the Chrystler Viper-GTS, as it's quite stable compared to the other cars. I'm tempted to try one of the Ferraris as well, as I see a lot of good times reported with it.

What I would love to see are the San Francisco Rush 2049 tracks ported to GTR... that would be heaven. If only I knew how to extract them from the CHD...

Labels: Games

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

GTR
Posted: 8:02:00 AM 0 comments

Tried my hand at GTR today. Eh, the graphics are nice but the gameplay rather blows. I find I do much better at other racing sims than this one. The sad part is the graphics are likely gonna have me coming back for more, not to mention the dozens of downloadable tracks. *shrug* Sometimes the best don't win...

Labels: Games

Thursday, April 14, 2005

Demogorgon = ARROWED!
Posted: 4:33:00 AM 0 comments

Now playing: Thomas Dolby - Quantum Mechanic (5:33)

Got a good run going in Nethack that was almost ruined by the presence of Demogorgon, summoned by Orcus on the second turn. After going through 25 potions of full heal or so, I was able to get him to run upstairs, get rid of all the nasties, and then follow him. I got myself into good position, whipped out the +6 longbow of diana, and fired away. Took about 6 or 7 +6 arrows. What a relief! For prosterity, here's the screenie:

Labels: Games

Monday, April 11, 2005

NetHack
Posted: 1:32:00 AM 0 comments

Now playing: Atomship - Pencil Fight (3:38)

Been playing a bit of NetHack again lately. In my latest game, I got pwned by a death ray that a randomly generated monster had. I had the amulet of life saving, but the damn ray bounced off the wall and got me twice. Arrgh!

Labels: Games

Saturday, March 26, 2005

Liquid War
Posted: 4:02:00 PM 0 comments

Perhaps the craziest and most addictive game I've played in a long time, check out Liquid Wars. It has many different maps along with skill settings you can tweak. And it's visually mesmerizing, too.

Labels: Games

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

#modarchive Story 2
Posted: 2:41:00 AM 0 comments

New #mas2 time to beat is 14'56"!

Labels: Games

Monday, February 28, 2005

No Racing!
Posted: 5:05:00 PM 0 comments

Now playing: RedHeat Sonic Soundscapes - Outer Circle (Vocal, Dance) (4:50)

Did I mention that after all this downloading and installing, my hard drive space has dropped under 2 GB, which means no racing until I clean up my hard drive? ARRRGGGGGHHHHH!!!!

Labels: Games

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Racing!
Posted: 8:52:00 AM 0 comments

Got that racing wheel I promised yesterday, and man what fun it is. I've pretty much raced away the entire day, and then some judging from the time.

However, my timing is suspect. See, I'm going to San Antonio today to see my brother's DMB tribute band play. The question is, will I be able to keep my Honda Civic under 100 MPH?

Labels: Games

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

NASCAR Blues
Posted: 4:53:00 AM 0 comments

While I've been able to successfully pwn at Descent 3 using all keyboard, the same can't be said for racing sims... Fortunately, I have a gift card sitting over on the counter that I will be taking into Micro Center tomorrow to get me a driving wheel. A fine reward for the hell I went through to get NASCAR SimRacing to even work today.

First of all, I wasted not 1, not 2, but 3, count them, three CDs trying to get this game to install. I finally gave up and used something called Alcohol 120% to "emulate" the image so I could install it.

But for some reason when I went to run it, it didn't like it, so I ended up using Daemon Tools and a cheap 19 MB "image" of the run disk to make it work properly.

The sad part is that this took up most of my day. Between downloading and installing all the programs, and still fighting for disk space on my hard drive - did I mention NASCAR SimRacing requires 5% of your hard drive to be available to play at any decent quality? - I got a whole lot of nothing done today.

Labels: Games

Sunday, February 20, 2005

Finally!
Posted: 6:30:00 PM 0 comments

Now playing: roncli, The Nightstalker - Decade (Instrumental Preview) (5:57)

After about a week of playing Miss Driller, I've finally managed to beat it. Final score 512,940, 12'57"63.

Labels: Games

Saturday, February 19, 2005

Miss Driller
Posted: 12:51:00 AM 0 comments

These last few days I have been completely addicted to Miss Driller. Largely because I can't beat it. The heartbreaker was running out of air at 993m. I literally will play this for hours at a time. Check it out.

Labels: Games