roncli.com blog

I've won another series and am now at Bronze II on the season, but not even Colz can stop me from getting wrecked by bad teams it seems, I'm 2-4 since placing into Bronze II. My mechanics are really bad, and I'm starting to wonder if I should be playing more than once a week to improve at my mechanics, but then I remember that it's Ron's Bronze Plays, and the plays won't be bronze if Ron gets good.

Descent Champions Ladder

I've won 3 more games against silver pilots recently, and that has rewarded me with becoming a silver pilot myself. I was never all that great at competitive Descent 1, and playing the masters of today really makes me feel that I have more to learn than just piloting. Granted, some of these pilots have spectacular aim as well, which is why I'm planning on switching over to mouse once my mouse patch gets into DXX Retro and becomes generally available. I'm almost to where I am today in skill with it, but need a lot more practice. I'm going to a Descent LAN in July, and I'm hoping that is when I'll be able to make the switch over to mouse.

roncli.com

I actually have good news about the website!

That's right, I'm almost DONE! There are only 4 bugs left. The font loading issue hasn't happened lately and I might be able to get rid of it. The login from cookie is a really strange bug that I can't reproduce, but is something I need to figure out and fix before launch. The allowed playlists deal was just a bad design decision I made earlier that I need to fix. And the fix image widths bug is where I have really big images that aren't being scaled down, which is causing the layout to break.

After that, it's all about content. The blog is easy enough, but adding the songs to Soundcloud will take time, and I need to write the pages for all of the rest of the content I intend to have. That alone might take days, but at least the major coding milestones have all been hit. I'm nearly 2 months behind my original target, but I think it'll be worth the wait!

Labels: Asana, Coding, DCL, Descent, Gaming, League of Legends, Ron's Bronze Plays, roncli.com, SoundCloud

Wednesday, April 08, 2015

Overdue update
Posted: 2:57:00 PM 0 comments

The Descent: Underground wiki has been taking up a lot of my free time, but I'm catching up.

League of Legends Ron's Bronze Plays

I'm finally in Bronze III after having a win on Lux and 2 on Janna. The promotional series games were so hard, we were actually quite behind in one of them. Thanks to Veg for helping me get through them!

I played with Colz last week and only went 1-2, but thankfully the losses came before the wins and didn't hurt my place in the standings any, so I go into week 11 at Bronze III and 26 LP.

Descent

If you've been following my DCL videos on YouTube, you'll see I've finally found some success, winning 6 matches in the past 2 weeks, including a match against the top bronze player to give me that spot. I feel like my aim is slowly coming online, but I'm going to try to play some "measuring stick" games against LotharBot (I've been scoring between 8 and 9 points) and Behemoth (between 5 and 6 points) today to see if that indeed is the case. I rediscovered the map June Bug, and am rapidly learning just how much I loved playing that map, too bad it was never all that popular.

The lagging website

I was expecting to have the new roncli.com done this month, but Descent: Underground has pretty much taken over. However, with that Kickstarter campaign winding down Friday, I should have time to resume my efforts, get something presentable, and move on to the next project.

Labels: Coding, DCL, Descent, Descent: Underground, Gaming, League of Legends, Ron's Bronze Plays, roncli.com

Friday, March 27, 2015

Slowing it down
Posted: 2:20:00 PM 0 comments

Not a whole lot going on this week. Work has been slow on roncli.com, but I'm hoping to pick it up and finish off major coding this weekend. Right now I'm working on allowing files to be uploaded straight through the website, which will allow me to manage the files without having to do something silly like FTP.

The Six Gaming Podcast was in rare form this week, as we had a solid episode and a good roundtable discussion about how microtransactions have been shaping modern gaming.

Ron's Bronze Plays returned for more League of Legends action, and this week I teamed up with Veg. The first game seemingly almost guaranteed disaster when I was put onto Jinx, but I outplayed the other ADC enough to earn a win and a promotional series. The next game I was on Janna, but our team could never get going as every lane seemed to feed. The best game of the day was next up with a 54 minute epic Morgana. Despite not having the kill lead, we kept up with objectives enough to grow a 10000 gold lead. Although we got aced twice in the enemy base, being 3-inhibitored multiple times allowed us to just play patient with Baron, and march in and win. The final game wiped all that out, however, as it ended up being a 3v5 after our jungler failed to connect and our ADC didn't start playing until about 3 minutes, and ragequit another 3 minutes later after having a severe level disadvantage. As a result, I remain in Bronze IV, but am still a game away from a second set of promotions. One of these times they'll go my way.

Finally, on my YouTube page, you'll find a metric boatload of Descent and Descent 2 videos I've been uploading, including my horrible start to the DCL. The highlight was an absolute crazy game in Fuzed where Jackeh outlasted me in a game to 20, win by 2. The final score was deep into overtime, 26 to 24. Fantastic game. I still have yet to earn my first win, the skill of the pilots still playing is clearly above mine. I have some targets to try to get that win off of, however, and will hopefully get on the board before the end of the current DCL season, which ends at the end of the month.

Labels: Coding, DCL, Descent, Gaming, League of Legends, Ron's Bronze Plays, roncli.com, Six Gaming Podcast

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Whirlwind Week
Posted: 3:01:00 PM 0 comments

A roundup of what's been a Janna whirlwind of a week!

Schedule

I've come to realize that, even after ending Six Minutes To Release's raiding run, I still only have one night a week to myself. That night is tonight. Every other night, I've got something going on:

Monday - Mastering and editing of the Six Gaming Podcast
Tuesday & Thursday - World of Warcraft raiding with remaining Six Minutes To Release members
Friday - Wife night :)
Saturday - Six Gaming Podcast live stream
Sunday - Ron's Bronze Plays League of Legends gaming on Twitch

It's a pretty busy schedule, but I look forward to a lot of these things throughout the week as well. Things feel pretty balanced right now. I still long for 40 hours days, though.

Descent: Underground

This past week, though, things got a bit crazy, because I found out that one of my favorite games of all time is being rebooted.

Descent's fast-paced, six-degrees-of-freedom combat made addicts of us all! Descent's frenetic and pulse-pounding action were light-years ahead of its 1995 release date. Like us, many of you still share war stories of your epic network battles. You remember your heroic shots, your death-defying maneuvers, and matches ending with a narrow escape as the tunnel collapsed behind you.

Sadly, as consoles took over and PC games were pushed aside by publishers, great games like Descent were left to languish in obscurity. A whole generation of gamers grew up without Descent's heart-pounding, non-stop action, robbed of the true 6DoF space adventure that is their birthright!

The Drought Ends TODAY!

This is a quote from the Kickstarter for Descendent Studios' Descent: Underground. This is a brand new Descent title, setup as a prequel to the original Descent series.

On one hand, I can't contain my excitement. I backed this project early and big once I learned of the direction that former CIG developer Eric "Wingman" Peterson was taking it. To have another Descent game being made from a set of dedicated developers who are listening to the community to make the game the best Descent game ever made is like a dream come true.

On the other hand, the Descent community has had its share of disappointments.

The official Descent 4 game was cancelled. Numerous projects have been started to try to mimic the Descent experience. Many of them have been cancelled, and those that did make it to production had no community support and were simply not Descenty enough for the community to back. And others who have tried to bring Descent back have been issued cease & desist legal documents by Interplay.

So why now? More importantly, why Descendent Studios, a team that never found the Descent community until after they launched their Kickstarter? While I have faith in their ability to deliver on their project, my faith with Interplay is not there. I really have to question Interplay's motives. Do they plan on this being some kind of cash grab? Are they thinking of screwing over Descendent much the same way PTMC's Dravis screwed over the Material Defender at the start of Descent II? That would be ironic.

Six Gaming Podcast

So the podcast happened this past week, with Episode 5 and its highlights now available on YouTube.

I'll be blunt, it's not our best showing. News seemed to be disjointed, the hosts were distracted with Twitch chat trolls, and the Round Table section was rather, well, bland. Hopefully next week, we'll be a little more exciting. SGP always seems to be better with more hosts.

Ron's Bronze Plays

This week I played with Colzaratha's smurf. It didn't seem to help a whole lot.

The first game, he played Ahri while I played Morgana. He did not have a good game. Every lane lost, and we slowly bled out. The second game was much of the same. I was again on Morgana against a Graves/Annie combo in the bottom lane that our ADC fed substantially.

We got our first win in game 3 when I played Janna. I had some strong Janna play this weekend, and got some crucial knockups to force the win. I tried to make it two straight on Janna, but despite more strong play, the rest of the team didn't have it in them.

In the final game, Colz and I switched roles, with me going mid Lux and him on Morgana. I went off for a 12/2/21 carry, and Colz and I ended in style. Result of the 5 games was an increase in 11 LP to Bronze IV and 88 LP.

Website Update

Last night, I was able to finalize the data I'm putting in the game box on the website. My article about the sorry state of gaming APIs really came to mind. While the Blizzard API has come a long way and the League of Legends API is pretty good, the Steam API still sucks (it's still missing an achievement feed), and an official XBox API isn't even a thing yet.

Really. It's 2015 people. Let my data go! Let my data be free!

Anyway, I still have to code out detailed pages for my WoW feed, get profile pages for my Diablo 3 characters, display detailed history of my ranked play in League of Legends, and at least show off the games I am playing on Steam, even if getting the achievements I have for them is rather archaic.

But honestly, this is the home stretch. After that is the life section, which really is just going to require me to set featured pages.

After that, I have a lot of content to update, which includes transferring my music collection to SoundCloud, updating all the tags on my Blogger and Tumblr sites, and recreate many of the pages from the existing site on the new one. That's not really a lot of stuff. Hopefully coding can be completed this weekend, and I can start on the content next week. I'm still committed to finishing by the end of the month.

Labels: Blogger, Coding, Descent: Underground, Diablo III, Gaming, League of Legends, Music, roncli.com, Six Gaming Podcast, Six Minutes To Release, SoundCloud, Steam, Tumblr, Twitch, World of Warcraft, XBox

Monday, March 09, 2015

Weekend Roundup: SGP #4, RBP #7
Posted: 5:33:00 PM 0 comments

First of all, stop what you're doing and subscribe to the Six Gaming YouTube channel. We go live with the Six Gaming Podcast every Saturday at 11pm ET, and post highlights from the previous episode the Monday after every episode. On the Podcast, we talk a lot about Blizzard news and games, but this week in particular, our fourth episode of the reboot, we had a lot of discussion about happenings from GDC and PAX East. @show_san dropped off the podcast at the last minute this week, leaving me to host. I was largely unprepared, as you'll see in the video. We did, however, talk a lot about virtual reality, free game engines, and more. I enjoy being there because it's an unscripted chat with friends about today's gaming topics. Do yourself a favor and check it out.

I also do a weekly show called "Ron's Bronze Plays", highlighting my struggle to get out of the Bronze rank in League of Legends. I figure if I could do it in Season 4, I can do it in Season 5, right? Riiight. This week, the seventh on the season, showed why it's still going to be a challenge.

I started out with a Lux game where Sivir decided she was going to curse out Morgana two minutes into the match for not taking the right skill to start. It only got worse from there, and although we had great dragon control, we couldn't crack the bottom inhibitor, and despite the other team not having a jungler we ended up taking the loss.

The second game I got a wild hair up my ass and played Caitlyn. My support Thresh, though, took far too many risks... risks that got him killed repeatedly. He ended the game with 13 deaths. I recovered from the catastrophe, though, getting 8 kills, my most as an ADC in ranked. The game was really back and forth until we threw at Baron late, and they 3-inhib'ed us.

In game three I went back to Lux, and I had a poor showing, my first game in a while where I didn't even register a kill on her. The other team's Master Yi was the story of the game as he'd get repeated triple kills, completely cleaning up in team fights.

The final game of the night I went back to Morgana and finally had a half-way competent ADC in Tristana who knew that engaging a Draven/Leona was not the best idea. Unbeknownst to us (until she got 17 kills in 20 minutes), we had a mid-laner LeBlanc on a smurf whose main was Platinum 3. We facerolled HARD, with LeBlanc getting 3 kills in 5 minutes, including one on a Shaco jungle gank when she was at low health.

I only lost 13 points on the night, though, so a good week next week can get me right back into promos. Hopefully my mechanics won't be as terrible as they were this week. Current stats: 9-15, Bronze IV, 77 LP.

Labels: Gaming, League of Legends, Ron's Bronze Plays, Six Gaming Podcast

A Recommitment
Posted: 4:02:00 PM 0 comments

I recently went back in time to the beginning of this blog and revisited the things that interested me back then. I found that I did a heck of a lot more blogging then than I do today, largely because I made a commitment to keep people updated as to what I was doing.

I started this blog when I was working on OSMusic.Net back in the day. I had a lot of free time, largely because I had no idea what kind of focus (and design, for that matter) I needed to get the site to take off. I ended up doing things in my free time that didn't help the site along. Such as blogging.

Blogging became a regular part of my life in mid-2005, and it was fun. I wasn't involved in much back then, as TiS 1 had died and TiS 2 hadn't been thought of yet. I started blogging about on-again-off-again gaming, then about the struggle I had with maintaining all of my side projects, then focus shifted to stresses at work, until finally things got so hectic I pretty much just fell off the face of the Internet, only blogging on major events such as hurricanes or job changes. I've tried to kickstart things over the years, but nothing has stuck.

But with the revamped roncli.com website on the horizon (I'm looking to finish coding and content by the end of the month), I strongly feel that a recommitment of sorts is required to keep content on the site fresh, and to enable easier Nightstalker-stalking, so to speak.

So, here's the deal. I do a lot of things during the week that I've taken for granted. The Six Gaming Podcast, World of Warcraft raids, League of Legends streaming (specifically Ron's Bronze Plays on Sundays), and other random streaming events.

I also still code a hell of a lot. Previously, I'd blog frequently about my findings with certain things, which would result in code snippets that show you how to read an NWS weather feed, or double buffer a list view. I still want to do stuff like this, especially since I'm playing with cutting-edge libraries such as rendr.

I just haven't given myself enough time to do any of this. But with me no longer running raids for Six Minutes To Release, that time now exists.

Therefore, here's my commitment. On days when I do something noteworthy, I will blog about it. You won't see me talk about every WoW raid, or every line of code I write, but it'll be frequent enough to give everyone an idea as to what's going on in my world.

Labels: Blog, Gaming, League of Legends, Life, Rendr, Ron's Bronze Plays, roncli.com, Six Gaming Podcast, Six Minutes To Release, World of Warcraft

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Year In Review: 2014
Posted: 3:37:00 AM 0 comments

In many ways, 2014 was a big year for me. There were a lot of big changes made right at the beginning of the year, with some exciting plans starting to form up.

Where to begin?

Music

I will always remember the end of 2013 as being a kind of inspirational epiphany for me. In the span of 4 short months I wrote 4 songs complete beginning to end, managed to record 2 of them as stripped down versions, and penned the final lyrics of a few more that had been floating around.

The only major song that has come out of 2014 is a dance-ish piece I call "Bullseye", which is designed to be more about the music than about the lyrics. Even the lyrics that are sung focus more on the melody, making strong use of some of my unique vocal inflections. There is only a single verse and chorus, but the usage of such are designed to give the song added texture, not added meaning.

The main problem here is that a grand total of zero songs were released in 2014. After having such a strong finish to 2013, I expected things to carry over into the new year. Looking back, much of the music that came out of 2013 was due to having a lot of extra time on my hands while in San Francisco. I was able to put notes to Reason because I had little else to do, and with commute times being upwards of an hour some days, it was not uncommon for me to do some writing in my head, and then later pen it down into lyrics or Reason. I haven't had nearly the luxury this year since I've not been in San Francisco at all, and opportunities to write have been few and far in between. I've got this awesome guitar I want to play around with, and just haven't had the inspiration to do anything with it.

I've always toyed with the idea of setting aside just one night and dedicate myself to nothing but my music, but right now I take care of Six Minutes To Release five nights a week, spend Fridays with Kathy, and do the Six Gaming Podcast on Saturdays. Music has been playing second fiddle to pretty much everything else these days. I don't like it, but I know that I will never lose the drive for my music. It will come back some day.

Coding

After leaving Sift in February, I took a month off and then joined HCC Insurance Holdings as a .NET programmer. So far, I've been doing a lot of VB.Net in WinForms, but this last month has seen me start to work on an ASP.NET project again. It's in C# with a Bootstrap framework, and communicates with a lot of different moving parts within the company, so it'll be an exciting project to start 2015 with.

Personally, well, I'm always full of coding projects. My big project this past year has been the remake of roncli.com. This project is designed to stretch my understanding of the node.js stack, as I'm taking advantage of projects such as Bootstrap, Rendr, and Express, and have been working with APIs from Twitter, Google Blogger, and Tumblr, with many more in the works.

roncli.com as a domain turns 15 years old this February. The current design is its second, but is one that it has had for most of its lifespan. I've grown to absolutely HATE it. I've tried a number of times to remake it but nothing ever stuck... until now. Currently, I'm nearly done with integrating the blog into the site. It is going to be a pretty big hub of all things roncli, so I don't expect it to be complete any time soon, but I have made steady progress on it since May with no signs of slowing down. The fact that I'm learning the innards of these node.js projects is arguably more valuable than the site itself.

Gaming

2014 brought about a gaming renaissance of sorts. Sure, I'm still playing World of Warcraft, but I've expanded my horizons into games such as Diablo III, League of Legends, and countless other indie games that have been slowly filling up my Steam library. I've not exactly shaken off the "hardcore casual mobile gamer" title, either, as I still am very much into gaming on my iPhone.

What brought this on was the fact that while I was with Sift, I really did not have any time to myself. Gaming became a luxury to me, something that I couldn't spend a lot of time on. Once I left Sift and realized that evenings do exist, I had a lot of free time. I began streaming to Twitch regularly, and this past July took the reins of the Six Gaming Podcast while cohost Jacob "Showsan" Showalter is deployed in the military.

Between all this and the increase in popularity of streamers and professional gamers, gaming itself has taken on a new meaning for me, and is something I feel I could take advantage of given the right environment. After I am done with roncli.com, I want to build something gamer-centric around the whole "Six Gaming" concept we've got going on, so I don't expect much to change when it comes to my gaming, at least in the early part of this next year.

Life

This year I celebrated my 5 year anniversary of marriage to my lovely wife, Kathy. The fact that I've survived this long without her trying to cash in on the life insurance policy speaks volumes. And the fact that she has supported me through so many things, both good and bad, really makes me blessed.

Leaving Sift was a hard decision. I felt I held on a lot longer than I should have. In some ways, I did. Perhaps I could have made a more positive impact by leaving sooner. Or maybe I didn't hold on long enough, as it seems as though some of the things that caused me to leave have passed. Whatever, hindsight is 20/20, and I'm not going to dwell on the could-haves. I did what I did.

And what I did was start a new job. It's quite a switch going from the rushed startup environment to the slow-paced, meticulously-planned environment of a publicly traded company. At the same time, however, many of the habits I learned while at the startup I've been able to apply to the new job, and the transition couldn't have gone better.

But there is still that bit of emptiness, that missing sense of adventure.

I only managed to take 3 trips this year. The first was our 5 year anniversary trip on a cruise around southeast Alaska in June. Then came BlizzCon in Anaheim in November. Finally, I just returned from Christmas break in Buffalo, where the temperature averaged a balmy 45 degrees, much warmer than usual.

I'm hoping to get back to the Bay Area soon. I made a lot of connections out there, some friendly, some professional, and some both! I am still very much fascinated with how differently things work out there. It was very exciting to be a part of the culture, and I look forward to my next visit out there, whenever that may be.

A Look Ahead

It's hard to predict what's going to happen in the next year, but I'm going to state my goals here. No, they're not New Year's resolutions, but rather things I want to get done and say that I've accomplished.

Complete and release full versions of "All In My Head" and "Paper"
Finish the updated roncli.com site
Grow Six Gaming into a bigger and more general gaming community
Get back to the Bay Area at least once

Some strong goals. Now, to work on fulfilling them!

Labels: Alaska, BlizzCon, Buffalo, Bullseye, Coding, Diablo III, Gaming, HCC, iPhone, League of Legends, Life, roncli.com, Six Gaming Podcast, Six Minutes To Release, Steam, World of Warcraft, Year in Review