Archive for March, 2009

PWI – your searches 3

March 30, 2009 at 22:35 · Filed under games, virtual-life ·Tagged , , , ,

It has been some time since I wrote about PWI last time. Today again a few questions from you along with some unrelated pictures. Two Santas and some flying monster. :-) Let’s start!

Q: pwi cash shop
Who knows what’s the actual question here. Buy your Zens here (login required of course), transfer them to the server (now they are called gold :-) ) and then there is that little sun on the bottom of your minimap. That’s the cash shop where you can spend your gold.

Q: pwi – element fragments
Maybe the search was related to the very boring quest where you need to kill blobs that have little drop rate. Actually you don’t need to kill them, there are much better monsters (but mostly around lvl30) – check this link for more. You can also buy them in cat shop (not cash shop! ;-) ) but they are often overpriced. Drop rate was very very bad once, now it’s quite normal.


MetroAionix as Santa

Q: mold mirage sword
Again check PW database. It’s dropped by FB19 bosses, but you have to have a squad without high level characters to have some real chance. Good luck. And yes, it’s really nice weapon for magic chars, I was lucky to get it and I used it until early forties. :-)

Q: pwi importance of reputation
Difficult to say, I’m still low level to know every aspect of reputation. But I discussed it in this post (search the word) and it’s also discussed on PWI forums.


Flying tortoise… or turtle or what ;-)

Q: perfect world international fb19 dungeon boss
See this post. I guess the searcher found what he wanted, I’ll try to ignore FB19 in the future. ;-)

Q: pwi best place to grind for wiz
The same Q: pwi wizard grinding spots
The same like for cleric. See this guide, it’s long, but you can find the section about leveling there. Shortly – flying monsters, poisonous is the best +-3 levels. Under the Heaven’s Tear (30-42), above the starting point for new characters (all three, lvl40), above the first quest village after your race’s city (e.g. Hidden Heroes Village, lvl50), above your cities for lvl70… you’ll find it. Search also “flying mobs” in this post.

Q: what can i do to lvl when i have no quests? pwi
Grind! ;-) It’s not a big fun, but it’s not that bad either. Or help other people with their FBs! Grinding is better to get coins though. FBs are better for reputation.


Me as Santa! ;-)

Q: how much rep is needed for fb19?
Not needed, the description in the quest is deceiving. Hope I’m not misleading now. ;-) You just need lvl19 and some quests finished (can’t remember now, finish them all :-P ).

Q: pwi archosaur
One more Q: map of archosaur perfect world
I was working on a really nice map of Archosaur, but somehow… whatever. Archosaur is actually easy if you don’t go into details. You can divide it into 9 zones (3×3), three of them have gate (north, west, south). In these zones there are always all merchants, tailors, bankers, blacksmith… you got it. Trainers (people teaching skills) are north-east and south-west (that is where the General is too). Elder is in the east (harbor). These are the most important NPCs. West is very very rush district with most of the catshops – so go to do your deals (buy/sell) there.

So that’s it for today. Hope it will help future searchers. Good luck!

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Beginner’s misfortune with home video

March 25, 2009 at 23:57 · Filed under real-life, software, video, virtual-life ·Tagged , , , , ,

After first two days spent with our new HD camera and Sony Vegas I was ready for therapy. So many codec troubles, so many setups that refused to work… I have a habit to reinstall K-Lite Codec Pack when some other application messes up my settings and Media Player Classic stops to play some files. Generally good habit, but mine has one flaw. While I progressively downloaded new version (4.7) I forgot to place it into my install directory hence I always reinstalled older one (3.x). This was just fine for Media Player delivered with K-Lite, but it was also the root cause why Sony Vegas refused to use some codecs for rendering.

That’s also the reason why I can rewrite my original desperate text. :-) Still – the truth is that working with codecs and video is simply way too complex. And probably also not cheap (or for free for that matter). What I want to do with videos? Nothing big actually:

  • to record myself talking to the camera (done, camera, MTS output file, …)
  • to record something on the computer (done via CamStudio)
  • to put both videos to the one (sequentially) and add some text… result should be tutorial of some sort.

First I tried Sony Vegas Movie Studio before I found out that output in the HD resolution (720p for instance) is actually not a mere codec setup, but it’s a feature. So you have to go for Platinum edition for ~$90. I moved to this SW (in trial of course – for the start). Vegas looks cool and I put both videos one after the other and played them. While the video from the camera worked just fine, the one from CamStudio did not. I’ve noticed that these videos have incredible 200fps, I tried also other settings with various codecs, but I came to the conclusion that I have to pre-process the video prior I put it into the Vegas. This funny investigation even resulted in my first YouTube tutorial test!

Now I’m luckily behind my first bad days with video processing. Many times I asked myself: “What have I messed up with this time?” Most of these questions were cause by aforementioned unlucky K-Lite mistake on my side. Trouble is that without some experiences all those error messages don’t tell you what you need to know. There is no “man, you have wrong codec version!” error, there is nothing that leads you to the problem cause. When I wanted to render with x264 from Sony Vegas it said “the selected codec does not support the current render settings”. Or it couldn’t open Lame MP3 codec – but it happily offered all these options I couldn’t use. Then you mess up with other things too and when you fix the root problem it might even not manifest properly! :-) Funny world of over-complex video technology with billions of various codecs.

Originally I also tried to find some free solution instead of Sony Vegas (or Adobe, Pinnacle, whatever). I checked a lot of software – SUPER, Any Video Converter, virtualdub(mod), avidemux, muvee, VideoSpin… but I will probably purchase Sony Vegas as my nerves also have some price (let’s say they are priceless for me ;-) ). Good thing is that now I work more with Sony Vegas (or my camera or CamStudio) and spend less time on Google. There is actually a lot of people with similar questions but answers either don’t work or I was just “lucky” and haven’t tried the right ones first.

I feel ready to do some tutorial now, but it will take some time. It will be probably about home music recording with tight budget or something like that. But that’s another story. If you ever suffered through your own pile of problems related to video processing, I guess you understand how I felt during last few days. If not, you’re lucky. If it’s still before you, my fingers are crossed for you. And double check codec versions! :-)

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My new home recording… studio?

March 16, 2009 at 22:59 · Filed under music, real-life, software ·Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Whatever… it’s cheap, but it’s my studio anyway! It’s been some time since I’ve composed my latest song. I’m a man of more hobbies than I can handle, I know. Gamer, programmer and wannabe musician too. (Not to mention I’m a father and husband too. :-) ) I can’t play well any instrument, but I compose my songs with acoustic guitar, ideas, chords and my weak voice. The desire to have my own recording studio – even the modest one – is pretty old. Nowadays you can acquire the needed stuff for literally a few bucks. My whole recording chain with both guitars with notebook included (but not bought for that reason) is around 1300€ – I’m sure you can do the same or better under 1000€ (or maybe even under $1000, as prices here in Slovakia are rather higher). I’ve got two guitars, I’ve got Midi keyboard, some microphone too… the last piece of the puzzle I really wanted was a mixing console.


My extremely modest home recording studio… no special room obviously

Of course, you can probably live without it with overdubbing yourself in the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation software) – but there are few good reasons to have a real mixer. I have one microphone input on my old Audigy sound card. I’ve bought converter from big jack (6.3mm) to small one, mono (not common in every shop, I assure you :-) ). First, the jack connector on my sound card was stressed more and I had to crawl under my desk every time I wanted to change microphone for guitar. Should I go for extension cable? Hell no! Buy a mixer and manage all your inputs there. Now I can also record voice from dynamic microphone and guitar from condenser microphone at once too! (No, stop telling me I could hack stereo line-in for that! :-) ) Real mixer has also better pre-amps for sure. I went for really affordable Behringer XENYX 1202FX and I’m more than happy, believe me.


Mixing console Behringer XENYX 1202FX

While mixer (and a bunch of cables) was the last piece of the hardware puzzle, there was one more thing to decide. The software. So called “Digital Audio Workstation”. While I used Audacity before, it has few disadvantages (and even more pops out when you learn what the real DAW is). I’ll name two for all – it can’t mix audio and MIDI tracks and it doesn’t come with ASIO support – although it is ASIO-capable and you can build it with it. Even as skilled Linux user I refused to do that when there is one better alternative – REAPER! I tried Reason first, I liked the sound (don’t beat me, it was the first proper synth I used after Audigy built-in wavetable :-) )… but I wanted to try more, not to mention I wasn’t sure I can afford it. So I tried FL Studio demo version too. I nearly even bought it – and if you like it don’t hesitate because it has great live-time upgrade policy (LOVE that!). But I’ve found it difficult to use with MIDI – pitch or modulation wheel did not work right out of the box for instance. I also didn’t like the overall interface to be honest, but that’s probably rather personal. Reason – on the other hand – reportedly isn’t good if you want to record voices too. I could import WAV, but I didn’t find the way how to record it directly into the Reason.


Boring Reaper screen-shot with lame project

I wanted ONE software solution to manage my project and then Reaper got onto my radar. Software that reminded me Audacity in terms of multi-track recording, with ASIO support for low latencies, awesome with treating audio and MIDI tracks the same way when possible – but with built-in MIDI editor (piano roll), good built-in plugins, VST support, you name it! With installer not bigger than 4 MB. Yes, mega, not giga. I really was skeptical at the start, but Reaper simply convinced me. And if you want to record normal true audio/vocal/acoustic (metal/rock/whatever) music, you should give Reaper a try. Yeah, and it’s cheap – only $50 for personal use, $225 for commercial use, but you can try it for 30 days officially and even more unofficially if you’re not convinced. I’m not sure I’ll pay right away after 30 days, but… I guess so. Somehow I like it and I can’t see any reason why not to support it.

Try this for 10 random Reaper screen-shots

Now you know why (aside from other reasons) I’ve been a bit inactive recently on my blog. Real life stuff, that’s it. I’ll definitely get back to this topic in future posts. Do I do anything else as well? Yes, I even played PWI on Saturday. :-) However, I have a lot of stuff to learn now because once you record yourself, you’ll probably find out a lot of things to improve. Even if you don’t take yourself seriously.

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