It seems to me that the days of creating a well thought out and personalized character are gone for the most part. Especially with the advent of 4E, players are being shoehorned into roles they may or may not want to play. Any group that wants to deviate from this now has to come up with a fairly complex set of houserules, and make sure those houserules are balanced against the rest of the game. My idea of a great RPG is one that provides a framework for me to create a character, and play that character in a group with others, without being shoehorned into any specific role. If I want to play a meek cleric that gets by solely on his healing powers, or a third-story thief that has a personal rule against killing, I should be able to. 4E seeks to strip that customization from me - too many of the powers are focused on the encounters, and too little are focused on the roleplaying.

What are your groups doing to combat this, if anything? Or are you going with the flow? My group has switched from 3.5E to a game called Savage Worlds. While SW has it’s (minor) problems, its a fairly simple system, and creating almost any type of character you want is possible. We’re running a The Savage World of Solomon Kane campaign right now, and having a blast.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, and how your group is proceeding.

Technorati Tags: 4e, escapist, roleplaying, savage worlds, solomon kane, role playing, dungeons and dragons, d&d

The revamped Tor website includes a new shortstory by Mr. Scalzi, After the Coup. Set in the same universe as Old Man’s War, its a short, fun romp that details a ‘diplomatic’ adventure by one of the bit characters in his main series. A very fun read.

Technorati Tags: scifi, fantasy, tor, books, entertainment, cavtroop

Andrew died in early January in Iraq, and had an arrangement with friends back home to post a ‘final post‘ (caution:brought tears to my eyes) on his blog - his way of leaving a bit of a legacy, and getting his final word in. Powerful stuff, if you ask me.

Why do I think this is remarkable? Well, it shows the power of the citizen journalist blogging in this digital age - even in death you can still get your word out, almost instantly, with the help of technology and some friends. Andrew loved blogging, as reflected in part of his final post:

“Believe it or not, one of the things I will miss most is not being able to blog any longer. The ability to put my thoughts on (virtual) paper and put them where people can read and respond to them has been marvelous, even if most people who have read my writings haven’t agreed with them.”

This is not about political position, Liberal or Conservative, etc. This is about the ability of a person - any person - in the digital age to extend his reach, get his word out - whatever that word may be - even from beyond the grave.

You can read his archived posts, both on his blog, and at the blog he ran for the Rocky Mountain News.

RIP, Andrew Olmstead.

Technorati Tags: Andrew Olmstead, blogging, Iraq, Rocky Mountain News

Cacti is great at graphing data - specifically in my case, bandwidth and disk space usage. Zenoss is a network monitoring suite, using snmp to monitor systems, networks and services, and sending alerts via email when various user-defined thresholds are reached. Smokeping is a simple tool that shows you network latency and packet loss over time. Together they give me a great view of what is going on in my network, and alerting me to problems ahead of time, so I working pro-actively and not reactively.

This entry will server more or less as ‘crib notes’ - there are plenty of instructions on the net on how to do what I just did, but this will detail the issues, problems, and solutions that I ran into. It also focuses mostly on the Zenoss install - the others were almost trivial to install and get up and running.

The install of Ubuntu on the HP DL360G4 went exceedingly well - simply popped the CD in the drive, and booted to the LiveCD. Once there, I ran the install program, chose the defaults for drive partitioning, and an hour or so later, I had a newly installed Ubuntu system. after setting my IP settings via the GUI, I had to drop to the shell for a small bit of work. Ubuntu doesn’t come with ssh installed, so:

sudo apt-get install ssh sshd

did the trick. I was then able to get the rest of my work done from my workstation, and not at the console in the server room.

Setting up Cacti first, i followed the directions found on Ubuntugeeks.com. The directions here were clear, and worked straight out of the box (which surprised me - kudos to Ubuntugeeks.com!)

I then installed Smokeping. This one is easy as pie:

sudo apt-get install smokeping

From there, I copied over my config from my old machine (located in /etc/smokeping), and restarted smokeping:

/etc/init.d/smokeping restart

I had to manually remove the .rrd files in the smokeping directory:

cd /var/lib/smokeping/Local
rm -rf *

Note you only need to do this on a new install, when you are copying over a config from another machine. It will rebuild the .rrd files.

I then started on the Zenoss install, using the decent instructions located on Zenoss.com. These instructions were great to get me started and pointing in the right direction, but were lacking in other areas. The instructions are targeted for Ubuntu 6.10 - I was installing on 7.04, and I’m not sure if that was was caused the errors or not.

Note that I skipped a few steps - my machine was already installed and on the network, so I skipped Steps 1-6 and Steps 8-10. I also skipped Step 15, as Mysql was already setup during the Cacti installation. Step 17 is where things got hairy. Dependencies. I hate dependencies. To start the Zenoss installation, you type:

./install.sh

And…an immediate error.

Zenoss requires python 2.3 or 2.4

Ok, so my system apparently comes with Python 2.5. A quick

sudo apt-get install python2.4 python2.4_dev

fixes that. Ok, then

make clean
./install.sh

And the install is started again. After a bit of a wait - Uh-oh, another failure. A quick

tail -n 15 zenbuild.log

showed me that the install requires something called ‘autoconf’. Ok,

sudo apt-get install autoconf

then

make clean
./install.sh

And…a long wait. And another failure. Tailing the zenbuild.log file again, I find I need something called ’swig’:

sudo apt-get install swig

fixes that. Rerun the install again (after another make clean), and Viola! Zenoss has installed successfully! Almost. Seems that some of the services need to run as root (hence the sudoers edit in Step 14). Except that didn’t seem to work. So, I pulled in the big guns - one of our Unix experts (hi Dave!). After much gnashing of teeth, and wailing, we determine that we need to do the following:

sudo chown root:zenoss $ZENHOME/bin/zensocket
sudo chmod 04750 $ZENHOME/bin/zensocket

This allows zensocket to be run by anyone in the zenoss group (in this case the zenoss user) to run as if root ran it (this is the set uid you might hear about). Now, looking in the Zenoss application (once you log in via Step 19 of the instructions), you can go into the SETTINGS then the DAEMONS tab, and start the three services that wouldn’t start without this last step.

Finishing up with the instructions from the Zenoss.com website, the last step I had to do was setup the email notifications. To make a real long story short, I never did get this to work with Exim 4. Simply installing Sendmail, and all was happy:

sudo apt-get remove exim4
sudo apt-get install sendmail

After all this, it was a simple matter of going into Zenoss, and setting up the devices that you need. But thats for another article.

Technorati : cacti, smokeping, ubuntu, zenoss

Today, Arsgeek.com begins the first (of hopefully many!) game reviews. We choose games based on both our interests, and what we expect our readership to be interested in. Let us know if you find this review helpful, not helpful, or if there are other products out there you’d like us to review!

We’ll begin with Combat Mission:Shock Force (CMSF) - a game that simulates a near-future conflict between the United Stated and Syria. The game revolves around the Striker Brigade Combat Team (SBCT), which is backed up by heavy infantry and armor assets. In CMSF, after years of state-sponsored terrorism the United States, with the mandate of the UN, invades Syria with the intention of cutting the country in half to prevent movement of the Syrian army. This will enable the UN forces to take control of the country.

Battlefront.com has a history of putting out good-to-great computer wargames, starting with Combat Mission:Beyond Overlord, to Combat Mission:Barbarossa to Berlin and Combat:Mission Afrika Corps. All of these games focus on World War II, and were generally received by the war gaming crowd very enthusiastically. I’ve owned and played all three – while CMBO had some teething problems, the series is very solid, and remains on my hard drive today, for the occasional game.

Thus, it was with great anticipation that I installed CMSF and activated it using the eLicense key provided, which was a very easy process. I immediately fired the game up, and started a quick battle scenario, just to take a look at the graphics, get a feel for the controls, and a quick first impression.

First impressions were favorable – the graphics are good – specifically the vehicles are very well done, the personnel are good looking, the building are average, but the terrain is slightly sub-par. There appears to be no terrain shading, so it is tough to get a ‘lay of the land’ without going to the lowest camera setting, and flying around, looking for the dips and rises to hide your assets behind. But there is something special in seeing a Javelin anti-tank missile fly downrange, or the tracers streak across the screen, or tanks fire a main gun round. The game is definitely good looking, with great atmosphere - a large step up from the earlier CM games. However, I had some serious performance issues - trees flickering in and out, and very poor FPS. Perusing the forums, I found out that I had to install a patch for Windows XP - something to do with dual core systems and power management (Microsoft KB896256 for those interested). Once the patch was installed, the game ran much better. Interesting to note that none of my other games I play and have installed required that patch.

If you are used to the controls from the previous 3 CM products, you are in for a shock. The keymapping leaves something to be desired - Battlefront went with a strange keyboard layout (several different tabs, accessed by the T and Y keys, and then a 9-block of keys for the commands). But they offer no in-game method to remap the keys to something more palatable. If you want to remap keys, you have to find the .txt file on your hard drive, and remap them there. There is also no right-click available to issue orders, as in the past games of the series. Previously, you could right-click on a unit, and a menu would pop up, and you could issue orders from there. Now you are forced to hunt with the mouse, or use a fairly complex set of keystrokes to get the same results.

Perhaps the biggest change to this CM product is the introduction of Real-Time mode. Traditionally, the CM games were played in what is known as WEGO mode. You have unlimited time to issue orders to your units, and when done, the action resumes for a minute, while the units perform the orders you gave them and you watch the action play out. WEGO still exists in CMSF, but it is obvious that Real-Time is the way Battlefront would prefer you to play the game. For an example, planning an ambush is next to impossible in WEGO. You have to get your troops to where you want them, then issue a ‘Hide’ order. You can chain the ‘hide’ order on the end of the movement command, but you have to plan the movement, then select the last waypoint, then select hide. However, even if you set a ‘cover arc’, your troops will not engage until you manually unhide them. Unfortunately, you can’t time this perfectly in WEGO mode, as the enemy might be beyond your ambush zone by the time you get to issue orders again. In previous CM iterations, you could place an ambush marker, and your troops would unhide and ambush the target at the appropriate time. In Real-Time mode, you can manually unhide your troops at the appropriate time. Unless of course, you had multiple ambushes going on, or if your focus was elsewhere on the battlefield.

Another large change is to the way Quick Battles are presented and run. You no longer have a point system to purchase your units with – you simply specify map size, and unit composition (Heavy Infantry, Armored, etc.), and the game chooses a ‘balanced’ force for you to fight with. One of my favorite aspects of the previous games was choosing the specific force that I wanted to utilize - now I am forced to use what the game wants me to. The second big change is to the map system – random maps are completely gone. You can only use pre-made maps, with pre-made AI paths built into them. Combine these two, and the replay value of Quick Battles is close to nil. Once you have played a map once or twice, you know the lay of the land, you know the way the AI is going to attack or defend. Quick Battles now only use the AI programmed by the scenario author/map creator - so if you have a poor map creator, the AI is really going to stink up the joint. This is the case with several of the Quick Battle maps that shipped with CMSF - the AI was given poor instructions, and either does not move on the attack, or moves so slowly that the mission basically ends before you even see the enemy. On the forums, the creators of those maps are giving instructions on how to fix them (by using the scenario editor), but this should have been fixed for the release of the game, and not left up to the gamer to fix manually. Quick Battles are my preferred way to play the CM series, and with their limited replay value now, I’m not sure how long this game will remain installed on my hard drive.

I started the Quick Battle that I had chosen which sets my platoon of M1A1 tanks near a bridge to defend the crossing. Immediately upon starting, my tanks start taking incoming fire from 400m away – apparently the AI setup zone overlooks my setup zone. A short sharp battle ensues, with one M1A1 dead, and many Syrian infantry lying on the ground. I call in mortar fire, and set the fire mission up. The fire mission menu system is pretty well done – you click on the mortars, then click on the type of target you want – point, area or linear. Then you click on the map where you want the fire, choose how many guns are to fire, the intensity and duration of the fire mission, and finally confirm. It is actually easier than it sounds, and works well. I then changed my mind, and canceled the fire mission. Clicking on the mortars again, to setup a new fire mission, and CRASH.

“Combat Mission Shock Force has generated errors, and will close”. My first (of many, many) ‘Crashes to Desktop’.

I fired up CMSF again, and this time chose to do the training campaign. Flying through the first two missions (one was a movement to contact tutorial, one was a firing range for heavy weapons), I moved onto the third mission in the tutorial campaign, fire support training. Click load, and CRASH.

“Combat Mission Shock Force has generated errors, and will close”.

*Sigh*. Not a good start. I reloaded CMSF, and decided to try another quick battle. I found that choosing the ‘Hills’ map will always bump you back to the main CMSF screen – apparently they forgot to include this map, or it is corrupted, and you can’t play on that map. Starting to get frustrated, I decided to load up the main campaign, and give it a whirl.

The first mission of the campaign was actually a lot of fun – you have to assault through a berm and attack a Syrian barracks, destroying at least 75% of the enemy forces. I thoroughly enjoyed this mission, and played it through to the end (a US Total Victory, if you must know). The second mission completely kicked my butt – and part of the problem is the fairly poor AI path finding in CMSF. Without giving spoilers away about the mission – I brought a platoon of Strykers full of infantry behind a large three story house. There was an entrance on the back of the house, and I instructed my infantry to dismount, and assault the house. Well, that was a big mistake – all three infantry squads completely ignored the door that I dropped them off in front of, instead choosing to circle around the front of the house to enter that way. Problem was, there were tons of enemy combatants in front of the house, and all three of my squads got slaughtered. In reading the forums at Battlefront.com, this (and other poor AI issues) is a common problem. I also had issues with vehicles crashing into each other, circling the long way round to get somewhere, or one vehicle just choosing to stop in the middle of a breach in the wall, causing the other three Strykers to attempt to circle 2Km around town to get to my ordered destination rather than waiting for the vehicle to clear the breach. Which it did ten seconds later. By then, it was too late – the three other Strykers were well on their way to the other side of town by the time the turn ended and I could issue revised orders. The AI is also fairly poor at protecting itself. Several times, I had Strykers hit by RPGs that didn’t kill the Stryker. Rather than returning fire or popping smoke and moving, they just sat there for the full 60 second turn doing nothing. Almost every time this ended up with a dead Stryker as the RPG team could pummel the Stryker until it was destroyed.

Im really getting the strong feeling that Real-Time is now the preferred method of play - in Real-Time, I could micromanage the Strykers reactions by pausing the game, ordering it to pop smoke, and reverse. However, I can’t stand Real-Time as I feel there is too much micro-management involved, and not nearly as much time watching the action. I much preferred the WEGO of the earlier CM games, to CMSF’s half-baked WEGO.

All in all this game has potential, and may live up to that potential after some serious patching. I did have some good fun when the game didn’t crash, and I didn’t need to use the broken or missing features. But in the state the game is in right now as released, it is almost unplayable. Between the multitude of CTD’s (one leaving me unable to continue with the campaign), the AI pathing issues, missing features (no smoke rounds for artillery, ‘adjusting fire’ for artillery missions doesn’t work), missing maps, the Quick Battle losing almost all of its replay value, and the near demise of the WEGO system (due to poor command ability), I can’t recommend this game. Almost every time I fire up the game to play some, I end up closing it down in frustration. In addition, there appears to be significant problems with the multiplayer aspect of CMSF - specifically there is no WEGO whatsoever for TCP/IP play, and PBEM (Play By EMail) files are too large for most mail systems to handle. However, both those issues are outside the scope of this review (I don’t play multiplayer at all, hence did not reveiw that aspect).

Perhaps a patch or three will fix the game – I will definitely be keeping an eye on that, as I really want to like this game, but can’t in its current state. Should a patch be released that significantly adds features, or fixes the issues I have above, I’ll revisit the game for a ’sudo-review’. I won’t officially change the score (I feel that games should be reviewed on their merits on release - many game companies nowadays feel the need to release buggy games, and patch later), but will update on the progress of the game.

Score: 1.5/5

The Good:
Graphics
Sounds
Atmosphere and ‘feel’ of a combat situation

The Bad:
Very poor AI
Crashes
Missing features (smoke rounds, adjusting fire, etc)
WEGO is an afterthought at best
Clunky interface, with no mouseover tooltips.
Limited to no Quick Battle replayability, without relying on the community for quality maps

Windows Vista is the next version of Microsoft Windows, an operating system for both home and business. As with its previous counterparts (Windows XP, Windows ME, Windows 98, Windows 95), developers of Vista have made available many shortcut keys to make our lives easier. We’ll take a look at some of these shortcut keys below.

First, I really want to thank those who were so supportive of this
convention. From Wizards of the Coast whose employees contributed
approximately $15,000.00 worth of products, to the Junior High School
Student who donated the one thing he could afford - a brand new set of
dice. No matter how big or small the donation, we offer a huge thank you
to all who contributed to this event.

Greetings All,

Well, Ziggurat Convention 2007 is finally over. I am sorry for the
lateness of this e-mail, but I will try to answer all your questions, as
well as share some pictures with you guys so you can see what happened.
I have been getting feedback from all over post about the convention,
and have the following bits of information. For those who have loved
ones who are in these pictures, or for those of you who are publishing a
story about the event, please write me privately in about a week, and I
will do my best to send larger copies of these pics to you.

First, I really want to thank those who were so supportive of this
convention. From Wizards of the Coast whose employees contributed
approximately $15,000.00 worth of products, to the Junior High School
Student who donated the one thing he could afford - a brand new set of
dice. No matter how big or small the donation, we offer a huge thank you
to all who contributed to this event. We are honored, and humbled by
your generosity. Boxes of left over gaming materials will be shipped to
MWR Centers throughout Iraq with supplies for the troops to use.

The most popular events held few surprises for everyone. The Console
Gaming, Rifts, Risk, Axis & Allies, Magic the Gathering, World of
Darkness, and Dungeons & Dragons were all very popular. What did
surprise us was the popularity of XCrawl as published by Panda Head
Games. SPC David Amberson ran that game, and gave a copy of the XCrawl
main rules book to the three players who chose their characters first.
The table was quickly locked after eight players, and more wanted to
join in, but were unable to because of table size restrictions. SPC
Kathleen Hiersche ran Munchkin Demo’s with a whole lot of prize support
from Steve Jackson Games. Hiersche was even confirmed as one of the “Men
in Black,” so she can run games at other conventions later. Another
surprise came from the influx of interest in ShadowRun’s 4th Edition
game run by SPC John Gilbert.

Ziggurat Con had drawings for prizes. SPC Amberson disqualified himself
from the drawings as the Convention Chair, and as the one holding the
drawings. The winner of the Grand Prize - a Core Rule Book Set, extra
dice, graph paper, mechanical pencils, a D&D Tote Bag, a Gargantuan
Black Dragon, a Colossal Red Dragon, 4 boxes of miniatures, a shield and
a short sword was SGT Gary Decker. SGT Decker really wanted the sword,
and after getting the sword, almost left the rest of the prize pack,
much to everyone’s laughter.

The following are e-mails and letters I received from those who went to
the Convention. I did not edit or censor their e-mails to me. I want you
to see what they wrote, and know how much they appreciate your support.
Because of you, this convention was possible. Now if we can only find
someone to run the convention next year - LOL!!!

“Thanks for the games I had a great time wish I could have stayed for
the whole con, the convoy I was taking to Bucca was stopped on the road
for an EFP and we never made it further than CEDAR II. I have two
question one when are you free I would love to get together and talk or
XCrawl or anything and second do you happen to have any shirts or
miniatures left? I here I left 15 min to soon and I did not have to my
driver changed the tire by himself at 1400 (I do have the best driver in
the unit ) well send me a message back let me know I would love to get
together.” - SSG XXXXXXX

“Given what we had to work with, I am proud of the results of this
convention. We had limited time, resources, space and people–yet stuff
managed to pull off a noteworthy event. The prize support was absolutely
phenomenal and the whole thing would have been impossible without such
loving, supporting gamers back home; even the major gaming companies
themselves, pitched in to help. One of the things that pleases me most
is the fact that everyone who came in walked away with something
significant. We weren’t even able to actually give everything away and
STILL everyone had something big to show for having been there. However,
one of my beefs with the whole thing was lack of attendance; we didn’t
have enough games being run or enough to fit the games we did have.
Which isn’t for lack of support–unfortunately, the problem with the
being the first gaming convention to be held in a warzone is that we
are, in fact, soldiers in a warzone. Mission requirements or inability
to travel prevented many people from showing, who otherwise would have
made it. The really irking thing about this is that we had people from
off-post saying they would show, who never did. But, I digress. I think
one of the bigger problems with attendance was a sort of resigned
acceptance of an inability to attend, so no effort was made; either that
or inflexibility on the part of certain unit supervisors or commanders.
No one specifically, that’s just how the Army is–the “grin and bear it”
attitude. Which isn’t to say we didn’t receive support over here.
Indeed, there were a few unit commanders actually in attendance and
enjoying themselves thoroughly. The goal of the event was achieved,
however; it got the word out, got us supplies to pass out to the various
MWRs, introduced some new players to the game and, most importantly, it
proved that it was possible, paving the way and setting the bar for this
sort of thing in the future.” - PFC XXXXXXXX

“First, I like to thank EVERYBODY for showing up to ZiggCon and
especially all of those who helped out! This event was put together BY
gamers FOR gamers. Without our fellow gamers, this wouldn’t have been
possible. We owe each other for the memorable occasion this past
Sunday. As much as we all enjoyed this event, it would have been almost
NOTHING if it weren’t for the folks back home showing their support for
us in this environment. They were the ones who donated the dozens of
thousands of dollars worth of gaming material that we ALL got a chance
to walk away with. While we had the big-name publishers dishing stuff
out for us, we also had the “mom & pop” game shops helping out, as well
as the individual gamers who were willing to donate their own gaming
gear. 20+ year-old gaming dice?! Heck, I, personally, won’t forget the
feeling I got from holding that 4-book stack of old-school AD&D books
from 1978! All of that being said, it’s only fair that the people, who
sent so many of their potential assets and/or prized gaming treasures,
get something back from us. I’m sending out a call to all who
participated in and all who helped with ZiggCon. Please send us any
photos you have and a review of what happened, what you helped out with
and what you thought. Essentially, this is our great big “Thank You” to
the gaming community at large and a witness to all of those who so
desperately wanted to be here. (You’d be amazed at the sheer number of
civilians and former military that wanted to actually be HERE for it!)
Let’s say thanks and tell ‘em how it went.” - XXXXX

So to everyone who helped us, we, the participants of Ziggurat Con thank
you for all your help. Without you, there wouldn’t have been a
convention to support.

SPC David Amberson
Ziggurat Con Chair

Technorati Tags: ziggurat, convention, roleplaying, iraq

‘Jericho’ fans assail CBS with 25 tons of peanuts - CNN.com

CBS, deluged with calls, messages and shipments of nuts signifying viewer displeasure, is reconsidering its decision, a source close to the production said Tuesday.

“This is a cool site that does video reviews of games. Nice when you want a really in depth review with pictures.”

Perusing the site, its a video review of off-the-shelf boardgames. Aaron wins for submitting the most unique link that fits within the Arsgeek theme! Congratulations (Did I say that already?)!

Aaron has won a copy of Inside the Machine, by Jon Stokes. From the No Starch Press website:

“Inside the Machine, from the co-founder of the highly respected Ars Technica website, explains how microprocessors operate—what they do and how they do it. The book uses analogies, full-color diagrams, and clear language to convey the ideas that form the basis of modern computing.”