Steve and Sam's Blog

A mod I’ve been watching for a while now was release, the much anticipated WWI Source. I was excited to download it when it was released with its uninspired, yet easily memorable name. I’ve played a few hours of it, most of it I believe were enjoyed and not endured but that doesn’t mean the mod isn’t without problems.

Hopefully this post will help show some of the issues I’ve had with the mod so far, as well as some ideas I’ve seen on the WWI Source forums and my thoughts on them.

Problems and Bugs

• Friendly fire defaults to off: this may not seem like a big deal, but it was for the first couple of nights after release. Every server that had any player count what-so-ever was full of griefers ruining it for everone.
• You can shoot and bolt while moving in prone: even though there’s no animation telling you this, it does.
• You don’t spectate after you’ve died: nope, it should go to spectator. The code’s already there for it, they just don’t use it. Instead you hover with jerky movement.
• If you select a class that’s full after joining, the menu doesn’t reopen and you have to re-select your team: this is very annoying if the MG class is full. You have to select your team again as well, I don’t see why you would have to.
• The infamous spawning bug: sometimes, after joining, you will not spawn after selecting your class. Sometimes you don’t get a reinforcements timer, sometimes you do. When the round resets you spawn.
• You can constantly spam the prone button: in most games, there is a delay for how often you can toggle prone, but in this you can keep on doing it
• MGs take forever to deploy and undeploy: it’s very annoying once you have sight of someone and are just completely helpless to do anything. Which also leads on to my next point.
• You can’t move until fully undeployed: it would be nice to move as soon as I right click, so I can get out of danger.
• Phantom player clips: There’s some weird player clips around, some blocking things you wouldn’t expect to be blocked like the top of a hill near Allied spawn on the map Devil’s Wood.
• Bleed-out doesn’t remember the weapon that caused it: When you die from a bleed out, it uses the player who caused the bleed out’s active weapon, not the one that caused it.
• Low-resolution death notices: The icons on death notices are incredibly low resolution, attacker pixel victim
• Score padding bug: if you switch to spectate, then join a team and select a class, and repeat, you will be +1 score better off every time you do it.
• Ironsights not aligned properly: a problem on pretty much every weapon
• Overpowered officer pistols: or sniper rifles, as they currently should be known. They do way to much damage at range.
• Dodgy animations: hands clipping through the gun, all sorts of issues here
• Bolting and reloading is too fast: you’d think the SMLE was a semi-automatic.

What could be added

Medics or Wound Dressing

It don’t think a medic class would be needed, it just doesn’t fit because of the absence of field medics in the actual war. But, something to counter the bleed-out system would be incredibly nice to have. Being able to dress wounds or a friends’ would be a much needed addition, but as suggested on the forums it shouldn’t heal health – just stop bleeding. I can imagine it working like L4D, but to heal others it would need some kind of incentive that makes you want to give it to others over yourself.

MG Class sidearm

Very easy to do, melee or pistol would be nice. You can’t defend yourself unless you are deployed which makes it really frustrating when you die from an easily-avoidable death on any other class.

Other things to consider

I’ve seen bits of other things I’d like to see addressed is simplifying the UI, which Dead.Pixel puts a very nice looking solution to here.

I will update this post if I see or think of anything else.

I own quite a few Steam games, my community page says 104. So why is it that I always end up playing the same old shit? That “shit” being Modern Warfare 2, mostly. I am a multiplayer kind of guy.

The single player game I most recently (and I use that term rather loosely) played was the first Max Payne game, a game released when single player campaigns lasted more than a couple of hours and I throughly enjoyed it. I haven’t really played anything since, not even Mass Effect 2 and Bioshock 2.

I need to start somewhere.

Google have made their new social networking site public, and they have named it Buzz. All it currently seems to do is make Gmail slower and turn it into some Twitter-alike. The only difference I can see between this and Twitter is that you can have threaded conversations rather than back and forth mentions which can be difficult to follow for other people.

Will it catch on? Probably not.

Thanks for trying though.

I keep getting emails from the old Xfire Plus site about this.

Xfire-PHP was an old library I made which was basically a wrapper for the XML feeds Xfire had, it would then parse them for you and put them into an array. I haven’t touched it in maybe 2 years, but I tested it today and it still works fine – and includes a caching feature. So hopefully this blog will show up if you Google “Xfire-PHP”, so you can get it here since the old Xfire Plus site is no longer maintained. It died a long time ago.

If you still want Xfire-PHP, download it here. This link should never go down since it’s on my public DropBox account.

For an interesting little experiment, I decided to make a little web page that counts down the release to Steam games. What makes it that bit more interesting is that it also gives you the option to launch the game as soon as it’s released.

The principle behind it is pretty simple. It gets the countdown from the Steam store page and uses it to calculate the release time, this is then stored in a database so it doesn’t have to scrape the Steam store page again. Then the countdown is calculated client side with Javascript and the page doesn’t need to be refreshed and doesn’t use any AJAX so it’s not constantly sending traffic to my server.

The only disadvantage with the current version of this is that it only uses release dates and app IDs that are accessible from the server’s territory. My server is located in Jacksonville, Florida so it will use the US storefront’s content.

If you want to give this a try you can see the countdown for Borderlands or Left 4 Dead 2. Want to see another game’s countodown? Append ?game=<appid> to the end of the URL.

I finally got a Google Wave account from HTF, though I had to wait a week to receive it which was incredibly annoying. I don’t see why it couldn’t be like how Gmail worked back in the day, when it was you know, instant. But with Gmail being instant everyone had an account after not too long, even when it was still invite-only.

In essence, Google Wave is “how email would be if it was invented today” and everything is in the form of a single document. This single document can be edited by anyone added to the Wave, and pictures and attachments can be drag and dropped onto the Wave (as long as you have Google Gears installed).

Google took an hour and twenty minutesa to explain and show what Google Wave can do, and that one real-time document can be stretched to do a lot more. Simple examples of this include a Sudoku game and a Twitter client.

I’ve found that it makes a pretty good IM client as well, since any part of a document can then become a chat. You’re able to see what someone is typing and can start responding before they’ve even finished which I have found myself doing in the couple of Waves I’ve been a part of so far.

It does, in fact, work a lot better than say MSN, especially when dealing with more than one other receipiant. For example, if you want to send a file to multiple people over MSN you have to open a conversation for each person you want to send the file to. But this you can drop and drag any file to some friends and if the files are pictures they can see it on the web page without ever having to store it.

As a replacement for email, I can see where they are coming from. But, I don’t personally see it as a full replacement, though it’d be useful for design documents and project planning which is a lot of the corporate world covered.

In conclusion, I’ve got high hopes for this once more people get hold of this but as a complete replacement for email I don’t completely see it but a very good replacement for IM.

The only problem I find with using Wordpress is finding a theme I like. There are so many themes but why are only a select few appealing to the eye? Being specific in your search makes it even worse.

After a careful few minutes, I have decided on this one. If you find anything better, please let me know.

EDIT: Changed it, it is over the top.