Archive for December, 2008

Happy New Year with Perfect World International!

December 31, 2008 at 13:40 · Filed under games, virtual-life ·Tagged , ,

You gonna need it. Ok, skip my crap. No criticism today. No hints on bugs, no desperation – but rather some optimistic stuff. :-) And more pictures with less text (if I manage not to write so much). Let’s start with Adria killing flying boss sitting on the top of the Stairway to Heaven mountains. It’s around level 30 and it hurt quite a lot doing it alone. I was actually lucky to survive that. There is a lot of these lesser bosses around the map. Some of them are are placed tricky – like level 70 boss in the middle of lvl35 mobs. I accidentally ran at it once and was killed before even knowing what it was. Goldwing is placed much better I have to say.


Bolden Goldwing – it was a tough fight for solo wizard on my level but I survived. Yesterday I repeated it being lvl49 – much easier of course. :-)

And now little picture of Adria in full red dress. Three parts (two visible) are Rank I equipment – quite good for that level. The rest is bought or crafted by myself.


Lady in Red – around level 35.

When I reached level 30 I could get my flying gear – sword in case of humans. This is the default you can get in game without any problems. It’s a bit faster than walk and can get you directly wherever you want. Some cliffs are hard to jump across. :-) And as you can see you can gather materials standing on the flying gear. Or fight – but that is less efficient because you deal less damage when flying. Significantly less damage I mean. Unless you fight flying mobs you should stand on the ground.


You can gather herbs and materials from your flying gear.

But if you’re interested in a better equipment you should buy it for real money! This is bigger flying sword – well we should all agree it looks much more impressive. It’s also faster than the smaller one otherwise I wouldn’t buy it of course. It’s probably not exactly worth those 20 bucks, but I wanted to support the game too.


Have I said something about flying gear on the last picture? THIS is flying gear! Prepare your $20 to get it though. :-) Or around 2 million of in-game coins.

What I really appreciate about this game – even if it’s not the core of the game mechanics – is how it looks and what can characters do. You can carry a girl even in a tiger form and when you embrace her (or get embraced) it looks cool. She lays down on your neck and scratches you a bit and you stretches like a pleased beast… lovely! You should also try various actions from action window (E).


Carrying girls in barbarian’s beast form. Embrace is also lovely. These details are one thing I love about PWI – it’s simply beautiful.

Legendary weapons are weapons made in Archosaur (exactly the place on the following picture) from molds. Mold can be dropped by some bosses, mostly in FB dungeons – but they are quite rare. My Mirage Sword is usable since level 22 and it was better than various weapons I got until level like 45. After that I changed weapons quite often dreaming about another legendary weapon – Wheel Of Fate. You can also buy it from other player – price is around 2.7m coins. That’s a lot of grinding, trust me. I’m still not quite there.


MiraZirma has eventually got her legendary sword too. Poor ImperialCat still had to live with quest weapon.

Some mobs are impressive and look scary yet they are not all aggressive (“agro”). This is one of them. It’s around level 19 just across the hill from Etherblade. When you see them first you have respect – but in this case it’s unnecessary because they just poison you and go down quickly. There are small ants around too – they will bite you to death much faster yet it’s easy to underestimate them for their size. Know the enemy, don’t trust your eyes.


“Please, mister, can we take a picture with you in this lovely moon-lit landscape?” And yes, we killed him afterwards. It was part of the quest after all. Killing, not taking a picture I mean.

Ok, now one picture full of relax. Two casters are refilling their mana while meditating and one archer guards them. We were probably also AFK (away from keyboard, just for sure ;-) ) but in a wilderness you need someone to watch over you because many players die every minute after some agro-mob catches them during meditation while they are AFK.


Watchful archer guarding two exhausted and fragile ladies. Archer is lady too though.

There are still many places I’ve never seen on the map. You can fly there – considering you pay attention to high-level flying mobs – but it’s useless otherwise. I’ll rather wait when my level leads me there. Or quests. However on higher levels questing is not enough to get you to another level.


ZoeAionix – my full attack cleric build – somehow got lost and found herself in Sanctuary. Very nice part of the map.

Finally and most importantly – we (Adria, Zoe and Argh… not counting my characters on other server than Sanctuary :-) ) all wish you Happy New Year and Zoe adds some fireworks. :-) Take care and see you around in 2009 with more PWI posts – that’s for sure.


Zoe wishes you all Happy New Year!

Leave a Comment

Desperate times with PWI

December 27, 2008 at 17:04 · Filed under games, virtual-life ·Tagged , , , ,

Today it will be more for people already playing PWI because some of the things described are related only to PWI and not to gaming in general.

The more I play PWI and read through forums and various blogs, the more I’m decided that my $50 were the first and the last I invested in the game. Should I invest more to buy some material that has insanely low drop-rate? Because so it seems. Many events in this game are not fun, they are cash shop oriented. Most news are about cash shop, new items, new dress sets. Even patch notes are dominated by events – mostly somehow related to cash shop. OK, I know that money are important for development. But can’t developers fix some bugs and balance the game that even non-paying players can play it normally?


We couldn’t gather this tree root. Cursor didn’t change to gathering function.

Non paying customers are slower, die more often unless very careful, there are tons of differences… why to push players to buy things like this? The whole Archosaur was full of people buying rough fur (of course for 1k or lower :-) ) and only few of them are selling (5k typically) – luckily the drop-rate for this particular item has changed recently and now it’s OK. The same goes for dragon quests items… my friend went crazy when someone wanted third pack of 10 element fragments in one quest! Element fragment was also my first “stupid quest” with Blobs of rebirth… they dropped it VERY rarely and to get 5 for everyone in a squad was crazy. But Soft fur? No problem, surplus all the time, everybody sells it. Something is flawed in item distribution. In case of materials you can still buy them. It is stupid if you’re willing to grind it – but you simply can’t because of your level – high level means that low level items drop insanely rarely. In case of dragon quest (DQ) items it’s not possible to buy them. Luckily – I’ve read a guide how to get rich (in-game coins, not in real life ;-) ) and one of the important point is not doing DQs at all because you just run around the whole map – or spend even more coins on teleports – and provide DQ items to various NPC. If you just sell it to them you can get hundreds of thousands of coins.

 My barbarian LOLs in a very funny way. No facial expression – and his big axe disappears. :-)

There are simply many little things that players should learn before they find out that this and that is complete waste of time and nerves. For example – on level 30 you can achieve Rank I and then you can get rank-1 items from NPC near General Summer in Archosaur. No problem. But on level 40 – when you in theory could progress to Rank II – you will find out that you have little “reputation” which is one of the characteristics. Reputation is gained for quests and you can improve your situation doing cyclic quests (“solo”) or helping with FBs. My situation is that I’m on level 48, I have 800 reputation and need 1000 (I needed it on level 40 reportedly!). Why I’m in so deep… troubles? Well, because I have few boss related quests unfinished. It’s quite complicated to set up proper party to kill really difficult bosses, you want to do it with your friend rather – but 3 is too little and who has 5-6 friends playing the same game with you? Sure, you can enter some faction/guild and they should help you – that’s true. Our faction is friendly – but small. Maybe I will reconsider this later. Sure thing is I’m not the only one having problems with reputation. Rank I things were cool for my wizard, but players report that Rank II equipment is too little too late. But – to be motivated – there are reports that Rank 8 (or whatever the number was) reward is spectacular. But how to get high reputation without leveling? Should I die often to lower my experiences? Then you read on forums that Rank/reputation and (again) DQ are simply badly designed and they are not worth the effort. So… now be smart!


On level 30 you’ll get your flying gear so you can fly even when you’re not winged elf!

Is it really so despairing? Well… no. :-) If you have good solo build you don’t even need friends for normal situations. Wizards and supporting clerics however have hard times beating the monster of equal level and it’s good for them to be in the party. Wizard and cleric together are good enough squad actually because there is no need for tank for most of the quests. Another important point is – have fun. Follow quests, ignore DQs, ignore reputation issues – this all is not the most important part of the game. Rather get recruited by some decent faction and try Territory Wars (TW) – it may be fun. But I have to try this yet. There is also very good way how to get cash shop items without really buying them – simply buy them for coins in-game from other players! Generally $1 is equal to 100.000 coins – which is something you can grind from monsters in 90 minutes on level 40 (maybe more, maybe less, it depends on class/build too). Of course, $20 enhanced jaguar (big black cat that runs fast like hell and you can ride it) means 30 hours of mindless grinding without spending any coins. But it is possible.


Some places are just so romantic… if you like spiders for that matter.

Also – the events can be fun sometimes. Recently there are snowmen in major cities. Killing them gives you a lot of experiences (especially on lower levels) and it’s one hit kill without any risk. There are some drops that you can… ok, here my knowledge ends, because there are few more NPCs added for this event, it’s a lot of gathering, combining – and because I have bad feeling about most of the events on PWI I simply sell all items and go on with my grinding, life, etc. It’s also no fun to kill some snowman before anyone else does because in such a crowd even ~200 ms ping counts. But it’s funny to see the whole world running around the Archosaur with bows (whatever the class is, all of them ran to their home cities to buy the cheapest bow ;-) ).


Dying snowman always says something funny.

Perfect World is far from perfect – nothing can be perfect, right? Every week there is a patch bringing some new item to cash shop, or sale (in the cash shop) or some event (related mostly to cash shop). There are bugs, some of them just visual, some of them really ugly. Player movement is laggy, netcode is pretty bad in my eyes (I think MMORPG should run smoothly with ping ~200 ms), game lacks proper customization but… I still play it.


Gorgeous view across Etherblade city.

While I wasn’t able to overcome missing control redefinition in Sacred, I can in PWI – god knows why. Too bad there are not more bug fixes in every patch and some skill balancing – because now there are some classes with some skills considered complete waste whatever build type you choose. But I have to finish as always – I paid for some games already and most of them had some bugs. PWI has probably a bit more of them, but it looks great, plays OK (if you can live with some issues) and if you play it with friends it can be real fun.

Comments (16)

Musician’s signatures

December 18, 2008 at 22:47 · Filed under music ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

Musicians have a hard job. Sometimes they steal – I bet it’s mostly without realising so. Imagine you have a music in your head for some time and you don’t know if it’s yours but it suits your purpose so well. There is no Google for music where you can hum a melody and it gives you “yeah, that’s this song!” (Gosh, I miss this when I want to know name of the song and its interpreter before I torr… oh, I didn’t wanna tell that!)

However – sometimes composers reuses their own materials. God knows when Mike Oldfield (or he calls himself Michael now, right?) comes with Tubular Bells 4 – for example. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s bad. All Tubular Bells-es :-) were full of new melodies although their structure is similar. Of course we can now argue about Oldfield’s stronger and weaker moments, but that’s off topic now. There is other way how to reuse something yours. Sometimes it’s in terms of “yeah, that guy has his own style!” And sometimes it’s “oh, again the same melody?” And sometimes it’s in between. There are things I call “signatures”. Sometimes they are hard to describe, you just know what it is – mostly it’s based on some typical sound (like guitar of aforementioned Mike Oldfield, or Brian May’s sound of his “Red Special“).

Sometimes it’s based on style of playing – this is probably even harder do describe. I’ve realized that I can recognize Santana’s way while I was familiar with only two or three albums by him – and I realized that when Smooth came into radios along with his major comeback album Supernatural. And I realized it because the song doesn’t feature typical singer’s voice from  Santana-band I’ve known from before. That was the moment I found out I can recognize his guitar style – his way of changing rapid and slow passages of guitar solo.

Finally – there are signatures that are right to your face. Even when Alan Parsons Project features more singers his music technique and procedures are so typical. But to name absolutely obvious reuse – start to listen The Raven from Tales of Mystery and Imagination – and than start with Breakdown from I Robot. I bet the bass link is obviously very similar to everybody who will try that – which doesn’t mean those songs are the same! Probably my favorite example of musician’s signature is Chris Rea’s riff where he switches guitar solo between two notes in a specific tempo – not always the same two, but I guess there are only two versions. You can hear it in different variations in Road To Hell II, Auberge, Winter Song, Red Shoes, Let’s Dance, Looking For a Rainbow, Daytona, I Just Wanna Be With You (7 songs are on two albums!) – either as a main solo riff or rhythm guitar riff. Chris Rea sometimes reuses his melody too much (compare You Can Go Your Own Way and You’re Not a Number – the latter I like more ;-) ) but his signature is something I have no problem with. It’s subtle touch so even when it’s present in more songs I don’t care.

After all – if you have a nice way how to sign something that’s your why not to do it, right? Painters do it – why musicians can’t? (Of course I would recognize Chris Rea by his voice too I guess. ;-) )

Leave a Comment

Java Simon 1.0, monitoring API, released

December 16, 2008 at 12:44 · Filed under java, software ·Tagged , , , ,

It is some time ago when we wanted to use JaMON API to add some monitoring capabilities to our applications. After a few we found it to lack some featrues – especially it was difficult to organize monitors. Hence we decided to create our own alternative that brings two features JaMON can’t provide – monitors organized in a tree hierarchy (similar to JDK14 logging API) and nanosecond precision (which bind us to JDK 1.5 or higher – which we see as no problem for most newly developed applications).

That’s how Java Simon API was born – the project is hosted on Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/javasimon/

Short description from our page:

Java Simon is a simple monitoring API that allows you to follow and better understand your application. Monitors (familiarly called Simons) are placed directly into your code and you can choose whether you want to count something or measure time/duration. Access to Simons is provided via static SimonManager.

We hope all necessary documentation is there and it will be extended in the future for sure. Aside from core functionality featuring standard stopwatch/counter monitor types we provide Simon JDBC proxy driver featuring these monitors – so you can check how various JDBC calls perform, pin down slowest selects, etc. Driver is JDBC 3 compliant with data source implementations available and it was tested with Glassfish/XA datasource with Oracle as the underlying database.

What can typical Stopwatch do?

  •  it can measure time splits, parallel measurement is supported;
  • it provides total time, number of time splits, tracks max/min time, time stamp when extremes were measured, deviation, …;
  • and like every Simon it tracks first/last usage time stamp and features like enable/disable/reset are also available.

Why we brought in a new API when there is JaMON available? Well, we tried it with JaMON but than we wanted to crucial things that JaMON doesn’t provide:

  • as said – we wanted to measure time in nanoseconds (hence JDK 1.5 or higher is required);
  • we wanted all monitors to be organized somehow – so we implemented tree hierarchy similar to java.util.logging API – this provides powerful features like enable/disable/reset of the whole subtrees of this monitor hierarchy.

Version 1.0 contains core functionality and we realize it lacks many important features in the bigger picture of application monitoring. Our plans in the future covers:

  • Declarative Simon configuration.
  • JMX access to Simons, their values and enable/disable features.
  • Sampling, collecting, agregating with persistence backend (file/DB).
  • …and probably more, but not all in the next major release. ;-)

Leave a Comment

Cesta (16): Mr. Blue Sky

December 16, 2008 at 11:31 · Filed under fiction ·Tagged

Cesta sa pomaly chýli k svojmu záveru a po tejto časti nás čaká už len posledných päť dielov. :-) Dnes už to stopovanie nie je to, čo bývalo – najmä na Slovensku, ale kedysi to bol naozaj celkom dobrý spôsob turistickej prepravy.

ELO: Mr. Blue Sky

11/8
Rehotali sme sa tak, až som sa čudoval, že sa neváľame v prachu s rukami na bruchách. Sú také chvíle. Isto to každý pozná. Najprv úvod do situácie: Ako sme sa rozhodli, vybrali sme sa “na stopa”. Čo sa neobišlo bez šaškovín. A na tých sme sa smiali, aj keď sa to nedá tak jednoznačne povedať. Ja som sa totiž smial na všetkom a na ničom súčasne. Už len preto, že sa smeje Barbora. A tá sa možno smiala len preto, lebo sa smejem ja.
Takáto nálada už trvala od rána, to značí asi tri hodiny. Zásadne sme sa smiali úplne všetkému, doslova každej blbosti. Potácali sme sa takto po ceste a robili show. Dlho sme sa ale nepredvádzali, lebo do piatich minút nám zastavilo auto. Okrem vodiča nebol vnútri nikto.
Otvoril predné dvere: “Kam to bude?”
“To je úplne jedno,” snažil som sa ubrzdiť svoj smiech. Vzápätí som si uvedomil, že to asi nebola najvhodnejšia odpoveď, hoci mala k pravde najbližšie.
“Dúfam, že vám nebude vadiť nakazlivo dobrá nálada…,” uisťovala sa Barbora, “my už sme raz takí.” Spiklenecky na mňa žmurkla.
“Tak si nastúpte,” usmial sa vodič.
“OK. My sa hodíme obaja dozadu,” navrhol som, ale skôr než stihol ľahostajne pokrčiť plecami, ozvala sa Barbora: “Len pekne padaj dopredu, nech ťa mám aspoň raz poriadne na očiach!”
Jej slová samozrejme vyzneli kamarádskejšie, než ako vyzerá ich obsah, konieckoncov korešpondovali s aktuálnou náladou. A tak som rezignovane pokrčil plecami nakoniec ja.
Šofér bol muž v stredných rokoch – mohol mať okolo štyridsať – s fúzami a krátkou bradou. Tváril sa veľmi sympaticky a hlavne tolerantne k blbnúcej mládeži.
“Odkiaľ s takým veselím?” vyzeralo to, že rozhovor so stopármi nadväzuje často.
“Teraz sme chvíľu stanovali v jednom lese asi pätnásť kilákov odtiaľto,” začal som sa šíriť o našej trase. “Predtým sme boli vo ***, tam sme pozreli ryzne…,” prelietol som rýchlo našou trasou, “…no a sme tu. A ešte nevieme, čo ďalej.”
“Ryzne…,” zamyslel sa šofér. “Hmm… tam je to veľmi príjemné.”
Slovíčko príjemné hneď upresnil: “Drsné a pekné.”
“Boli ste tam?” spýtala sa reflexívne Barbora, aj keď odpoveď už vlastne poznala.
“Hej, s deťmi,” pousmial sa, asi mal na to pekné spomienky. Pozrel sa do spätného zrkadla, možno len tak, možno sa tam stretol s pohľadom Barbory. Obzrel som sa. Usmiali sme sa – teda hlavne ja, lebo ona mala vysmiate stále – hodila na mňa svoj tik obočím, jej obľúbený tichý pozdrav.
“Kam vlastne idete?” spýtal som sa.
“K Priehrade,” odvetil šofér. To bolo asi hodinu cesty. Všimol som si, že sa v strednom stĺpiku krčí autorádio s kazetovým prehrávačom, na čo som hneď skočil.
“Mohol by som si niečo pustiť?” spýtal som sa teda.
“Ak máte kazetu…,” usmial sa s nehranou samozrejmosťou. “Ja som svoje omylom nechal doma.”
Vláčil som so sebou box na dvanásť kaziet, to kvôli walkmanu – aj keď som ho teraz už tretí deň nepočúval, lebo mi došli akumulátory. Bez hudby proste nefungujem. Dostal som náladu na čosi odpichovejšie, a tak som vybral Madonnu a strčil ju do “slotu” tak, ako som dúfal, že je to správne. Našťastie bolo. Keď chlapík spoznal úvodnú Papa Don’t Preach, pokýval hlavou zo strany na stranu a obrátil sa ku mne: “Ako hlasno počúvate hudbu?”
“Hlasnejšie – lepšie,” odvetila miesto mňa Barbora. Prikývol som na súhlas. Muž vytočil hlasitosť na solídnu hodnotu, ale tak, aby sme na seba nemuseli kričať, aj keď hudba bola dominujúcim zvukom v interiéri vozu.
Vonku bol krásny modrý deň. Uvažoval som o pokračovaní našej cesty, ak by sme sa nechali vyklopiť niekde pri Priehrade. Preliezli sme troje prekrásne hory, bolo by dobré trochu zmeniť kurz. Obrátil som sa na Barboru: “Podáš mi, prosím ťa, mapu?”
“Ktorú?” otázka mala svoj dôvod, keď už sme mali sedem máp.
“Okolie Priehrady,” špecifikoval som.
Asi sedemdesiat kilometrov od Priehrady sa nachádzala oblasť pieskovcových skál, čo nebolo na zahodenie. Predsa len sme sa obaja veľmi radi škriabali po skalách a tu by sme si užili aj trochu rizika… Vedel som, že skaly sú živlom, ktorý by nám obom vyhovoval.
“Podnikáte nejakú veľkú turistickú akciu?” spýtal sa nás vodič.
“Nech žijú prázdniny!” odvetil som trochu od veci miesto prikývnutia. Barbora si asi povedala, že to nie je dostatočná odpoveď, a tak ma doplnila: “Dá sa to tak povedať.”
“Netušil som, že sa aj dnes mladí vedia odpútať od civilizácie,” pousmial sa.
“To sme pôvodne netušili ani my,” oplatil som mu úsmev, konieckoncov to bola pravda.
Oprel som sa o sklo dverí a “hmkal” si nejakú melódiu. Prechádzali sme rovným, širokým údolím, ktoré mohlo mať naprieč asi tridsať kilometrov. Oproti tomu sa na severe vypínali najvyššie štíty tohoto “venca” Karpát a na juhu hory len o málo nižšie. Vedľa sa proti nám valila najdlhšia rieka republiky, za ňou sa rozprestierali fľaky zemiakových polí. Vyššie položená poľnohospodárska oblasť…
Aj keď šofér nevyzeral ako cestný pirát, na tachometri mal stodesať, čo si na tejto ceste isto nemôže dovoliť. Ešte paradoxnejšie mi v tomto smere pripadá, keď nás predbieha nejaký šialenec. A to sa dialo prakticky stále. Podal som mapu dozadu Barbore, aby ju hodila do obalu.
Slnko mi začalo nepríjemne pleštiť do očí, a tak som si sklopil clonu nad čelným sklom, pričom som si všimol, že na clone je zrkadlo. Posunul som hlavu trošku doľava, aby som videl Barbore do očí.
“Na čo myslíš?” spýtala sa ma svojou najčastejšou otázkou.
“Neviem,” odvetil som, ale dnes som neodbočil zrakom, ako to zväčša robievam, keď mám čosi povedať.
“To bol reflex,” zatvárila sa znechutene. “Isto vieš, na čo myslíš.”
“Na cestu,” povedal som. Bola to pravda… tak trochu.
“Nejak často,” podozrievala ma Barbora. “Nemyslíš?”
Napriek krátkej výmene viet nik z nás neuhol pohľadom, čo nemohlo skončiť inak, než “súbojom očí”. Nikomu nevadilo zrkadlo ako odrazová plocha. Vedel som, že na svoju poslednú poznámku nepotrebuje Barbora žiadnu odpoveď. Mohla vedieť, že málokedy nemyslievam na ňu.
“Kto z koho?” tikol som na ňu obočím.
“Neuhnem,” mykla Barbora plecom. Vedel som, že to môžem brať vážne.
“Ani ja,” mykol som plecom pre zmenu ja. Vedela, že to môže brať vážne.
Ale po chvíli som sa rozhodol ustúpiť. “Dobre,” pousmial som sa, “ale len že si to ty.”
“Dobre,” súhlasila. A tak som vypratal bojové pole. Nebudem predsa v prekrásny modrý deň kaziť malú detskú radosť svojej momentálne najbližšej priateľke…

Leave a Comment

Older Posts »