Taller Starcraft @ Campus Party

BWAPI 2.6.1 :

http://code.google.com/p/bwapi/downloads/detail?name=BWAPI_Beta_2.6.1.zip&can=2&q

Chaos launcher:

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=65196

BWAPI 2.6.1 - Pack:

http://dm-jp.com/dist/sc/

Last WoW day

to be honest, my account sttoped working today so I used a friend's account to access a few minutes of gameplay today, I placed special attention to some technical features trying to figure out how the programmers deal with so many million players in their servers, earlier today i realized that WoW handles collision physics in a differentway from what one would expect, for example there's no collision with forniture objects nor with human characters.

Another important aspect to consider is the network traffic while you play, there are a big number of players at the same time, all of them reading from the server and saving their states thanks to the persistence the game has, even so, the game feels kind of fluid so there's no big trouble on the client side.

Playing this game made me consider it as one of those "must play" titles which represent a whole era of online gaming for future references.

Taking the ship trip

As I stated earlier, one of the things that I really liked about hangin around is that, at specific times, a ship comes to a port ahich will eventually take somewhere else, but the arrival is

announced and a lot of players gather to take the flying ship, that's just too cool, you know somethin'g happenig and like a real bus stop, you have to wait for the ship to get there,lovely!

This time I decided to just let it go and take the trip, it was an exciting adventure out of the normal,slow-paced action I used to have in my original town, the new place (whose name I can't remember) is full of strong and big menacing creatures having fun playing with others, i know this wasn't the right place for me (again,it's not the first time it happens) but I just wanted to get to know a bit more about my world before my trial is over , that's the spirit right not, explore, you can immediately feel the world is so big that you hardly ever get to know it entirely, unless you spend your whole life going from town to town ( which seems to happen in some cases :S)

Either way, even though I added some friends so that i could play with them and go into quests in group, I never found evidence of any of them, additionally, perhaps due to my begginner level, I saw just a few number of human players while the most was actually NPCs that wasn't that fun,but anyway, i guess tomorrow will be my last day to play, and maybe I will eventually buy the monthly subscription.

Playing in dangerous zones

Today i was playing a bit more (hope this counts as a separate day since I blogged earlier today) and suddenly found myself lost in the middle of nowhere, to my bad luck there were dangerous wolves all around me which used to attack me even if I didn't fight them, then I realized I got into some advanced place (don't remember its name,but passing a big wooden door) where also some skeletons attacked me as soon as I got close to them, they levels were way above mine (9 or so) so they would kill me easily.

It wasn't fun at all, because I used to get killed in the middle of lots of enemies, so when I used to return to the place my corpse was, I would get killed again (I didn't like the idea of coming to life in the cementery). Fortunately, there was some unkown guy just hanging around who helped me to get rid of those monsters, he actually talked to me and told me that this wasn't the right place for me, that I should go back, increase my level and skills, and then return to that place, otherwise I wouldn't make it by myself, I followed his instructions and made my way back to a safer place, on my way there I could see an amazingly big flying ship which you can ride in order to get to new places, but since I was a bit afraid of falling in the same fight/lose/revive pattern i preferred to go and gain more experience, either by doing quests or killing monsters.For now it's been enough suffering for me, I hope I'll keep my epic adventure tomorrow morning.

Improving my character

Well, things started to get a bit complicated, it's 3am and I just finished playing WoW, I found the importance of the objects my enemies leave when I kill them, long ago, I used to just keep those objects but never really get the most out of them, now, i realize that they actually help me improve my character (by equipping them).

Now I'm wearing better boots, vest and some sort of armor which allows me to keep fighting longer against my enemies without dying, additionally my money can help me get training with a Warrior Trainer and learn new movements that way.

I even found that when i get killed i can talk to the Spirit to bring me to life again on the same graveyard without having to travel through the whole world looking for my body (which used to take me so long).

I'll play it again in a few hours just because my account is about to expire, but for now, let's sleep =)

Quests in WoW

Yesterday I was playing WoW a bit more and got into some simple quests such as killing a certain number of enemies or getting some sort of stuff, but I immediately found out that quests (at least at first) might be confusing, when you talk to someone who gives you a quest, he/she tells you what to do and where to go, you have to put special attention on what he tells you because one can easily get lost in the places and people you have to talk to.

Additionally, you have to decide wether accept the quest or not, balancing between what the prize is (exp points, new items) and how long it takes you to do the quest, so you can look for the best or what you need the most.

One of the things that pushes me the most to keep playing is seeing other players riding big monsters or eve with vehicles, I want to get to that level (perhaps even if I have to pay) just because it looks cool.

I'll keep playing a bit more later today to keep increasing my level, righ now, I'm about to be level 7.So let's go for it!

No WoW for today =(

Well, today I wanted to play a bit of WoW at the office and in my house but sadly, there was some sort of maintenance in the WoW serves so my connection was rejected when I tried to log in, i hope tomorrow I'll be able to play a bit more since time's running up to end my 10 day trial.

Gaining Experience in WoW

Last night I was playing WoW just to get some experience and increase my level, I started killing small monsters such as spiders and simple enemies, but suddenly I found myself fighting against level 5 enemies while i was level 2 or 3, and taking mose Quests which i dind't really understand, that might not have been the best option (or maybe it was) but the fact is that my character started to increase its level, right now it's level 4, and will continue increasing for sure since later today it's playtime, so see you in a few hours you WoW players!

Finally WoW up & running

Well, I finally got my WoW game working, thanks to my friends Gonzalo and JP (who gave me about 20GB in updates), so the time has come, let's start the journey!! first off, chosing character was a bit special because some friends and I agreed to be part of the same journey by choosing the Undead on the Horde!

As for me, I decided to be a warrior so that I could fight with others and be helped by my friends who are Chamans or something like that, the idea of choosing your character,genre and physical aspects (customize it), makes you feel you're part of the game, so it really gets you into the vast universe of Warcraft.

The first steps out on the graveyard were cool,immediately looking for some nice level 1 creature to kill and earn experience as soon as possibly and hang around the place for a while, getting used to the controls and many options the game has, but to my bad luck, I had some work to do, so I didn't play too much (about 20min), hopefully tomorrow I'll keep playing more and more trying to get te best out of it

Installing WOW on my Computer, an epic journey...

After getting a trial DVD to install WOW, I got a bit frustrated because i had to download 3.3 GB of updates and even worse, once the download was complete, it started downloading additional patches, the whole thing took about 2 days to finish, last night at about 10pm it finally ended, but sadly an error was found while trying to overwrite a file, I must admit I was a bit angry by then, so I just went to sleep hoping that I'll be able to finally start playing the game today.

It's good to mention that i think the installation process should be improved in any way, it's not nice to wait that long in order to get the game up and running, something similar happened to me when I was trying to install Star Craft II, took me about 3 days and when it finished downloading the necessary stuff, my trial period was over, so I couldn't play the game =( .

Game design Course With Ed keenan (Second class)

Well, this blog will be back to life again, I'm not such a big of blogging, but it's always good to have this "space" so that I can tell whatever's on my mind.

Yesterday we had the second class of the "Introduction to Game Design" which we are taking at Ibero with Ed keenan, I'm glad to tell you that the course has gone pretty good so far, and I really like it, yesterday we watched the movie "King of Kong" it shows the never-ending struggle between two guys for the best Donkey Kong player in the world, but I think it goes far beyond that, it also shows how people can get stuck in the 80s continuously trying to achieve something that, in my humble opinion, it's not worth it =(. You can see the guys losing part of his (familiy) life playing video games in an insane way without even realizing how bad that can be. Anyway, the movie worked as an opener to the importance of Culture inside the video game industry, and how different cultures can see the same game with different points of view, which might lead to unexpected success or a terrible failure for an specific game, that's why it's important to consider the cultural background of each region in order to be able to deal with all those different opinions, and bring the best game for the appropriate audience.

Also, the main goal for re-opening this blog is to continuously tell my experiences while I play World Of Warcraft, which is one of the assignments we've got for this course, so,I'll be posting stuff about it. But for now, i have to go. See you!