Received my new power supply this afternoon…  I’m back up and running.  Hopefully there isn’t anything else wrong with my machine.

Threw together a Hurricane to run some L3 missions last night.  Grabbed a fitting off BattleClinic…  Tweaked it a bit to meet my needs…  Then undocked for my maiden flight.

It was kind of weird using projectile weapons…  Had to get much closer – I was fighting between 10 and 20 km.  Seems like a melee after lobbing missiles from 60+ km away.  And projectiles aren’t very showy…  No big explosions like missiles, no glowy light trails like lasers.  But they are effective.

Of course, I’ve got no idea what kind of ammo I should be using…  So I’m probably losing DPS there.  I’m sure if I loaded up the right ammo I’d be killing things quicker.

I’ve also got a couple light missile launchers fitted, to take care of the smaller ships.  Things like frigates.  It’s much easier to take those down with missiles than with guns – at least with my skills where they are.

So, I ran that first mission, then headed back to the station to turn it in.  And before I was able to do anything else, my PSU died.

I’m not sure if my PSU fan was unhappy in addition to my case fan…  Or if it just suddenly decided to die…  Or if the heat from the dead case fan killed it…  But it’s dead.

Unfortunately, I live in the ass-end of nowhere, so I can’t just buy one off-the-shelf around here.  Well, I could…  If I wanted to pay about twice what I should be.  Staples has a 500w PSU for $100.  Best buy has a 600w PSU for $90.  And, while the 600w is certainly a better deal…  It’s still about twice what it should be.

So, I’ve ordered one from Amazon…  And my computer is dead until it arrives.

Upgraded my computer last night…  Went pretty smoothly.  Didn’t even try to do a fresh install of Windows, so I didn’t run into the problems I did with Terri’s computer.  Although I did forget to plug power in to my optical drive, so that isn’t currently working.  But that’s an easy fix.

Had to re-install Divinity II afterward, even though I didn’t touch my hard disks.  It was looking for some remnant of nVidia PhysX software I used to have installed, before replacing that video card with an ATI.

It’s absolutely amazing how different the game looks.  Everything is genuinely unfamiliar.

I was playing on basically the lowest possible settings.  Turned everything down or off.  No shadows, no HDR, no light shafts, nothing interesting.  And now I’m playing on extreme settings.  It looks gorgeous.

The lighting is much more interesting, more complex.  Everything isn’t just flatly lit from some mysterious source.  Instead, things are lit from sources in the environment.  Sources with different colors and textures and intensities.  Sources that can be blocked, and cast shadows.  The world isn’t just shinier, or more vibrantly lit…  It isn’t just that there’s more polygons and more vegetation and random objects…  The whole environment is much richer.

It’s very hard to describe just how much different the game looks now…

Outside of gaming – surfing the web, playing music – I’m not noticing much of a difference.  The soundcard works fine…  The network works fine…  Disk access is as quick as it ever was…  It’s all more than sufficient for my day-to-day tasks.  But, then again, so was my old machine.

Terri’s new computer is up and running.

AMD Phenom II x4, Radeon HD 5750, 4 GB RAM, and a 500 GB HDD.

I wanted to do 8 GB RAM, but I didn’t really feel that I could justify the price.  I just don’t think we’d see much performance for the extra $40.  And it’s probably the easiest component to upgrade, so we can easily add another 4 GB at a later date.

It plays Divinity II beautifully.  Cranked the settings up to extreme and it runs flawlessly.  Smooth visuals, responsive mouse, gorgeous graphics.  Absolutely awesome.

Can’t wait to get mine up and running…

But I think it’s a little late to embark on that adventure tonight.

The hardware install was a piece of cake.  It’s a simple, generic case with an ATX motherboard, so everything fit together without any problems.  Then I tried to do a clean install of Windows 7…

Surprisingly enough, it booted right off the old HDD without even complaining.

But it wouldn’t boot off the Windows 7 install disc.  Kept rebooting, choosing different startup options, unplugging different disk drives…  Then I realized that I was trying to boot off of a Microsoft Office disc.

Once I had the right disc in, it booted just fine and started installing.

A little past the halfway point, the Windows install crapped out.  Complained about a missing or corrupt file.  Couldn’t finish.

So I tried to boot off the old HDD again…  But BOOTMGR was gone.  The install process had removed it.

Had to boot off the Windows disc again and run a repair install to the old HDD.

Once her machine was up and running, I had to grab drivers for the new hardware…  And the video driver install crapped out midway through and brought the machine down with a BSOD.  But then I found a newer driver that worked fine.

Then we installed Divinity II and tried it out…  And the results were simply amazing.

Got a box from Newegg today…  All our new toys.  Going to assemble Terri’s computer momentarily.

Terri stashed away a chunk of money from our tax refund this year.  The intent was to use it to go on vacation somewhere…  But, to be honest, that just wasn’t going to happen.

I’m insanely busy at the hospital.  The odds of me actually taking a full week off anytime soon are not good.  And then we’d need to get somebody to watch our animals if we went anywhere…  And I’m honestly not even sure where we’d go on a vacation.

I’ll certainly take some time off here and there…  And we might run across the lake or spend the night somewhere…  But I really don’t think we’re going to wind up going anywhere for any amount of time.  Certainly nothing that’d use up the money Terri has stashed away.

So, instead of saving that money for a vacation that’ll likely never happen, we’re spending it on some computer upgrades that will see an immediate return on investment.

I built these computers back around 2008 or so, and they’ve served us very well.  We’re both computer geeks, and we spend pretty much all our leisure time logged in to a computer.  I read forums, I blog, I send email, I play games…

And, until fairly recently, our machines have held up pretty well.  Could play just about anything, and it ran well and looked good.

But lately I’ve been having to turn settings down.  I’ve started disabling anti-aliasing on everything, just to make sure I get decent performance.  I’ve had to turn off or turn down anisotropic filtering…  I’ve had to tweak LoD and shadows and texture quality…  But, generally, things were still running and still looking decent…

Until Divinity II.

Divinity II has pretty much brought my computer to its knees.

It started out with some simple input lag…  Just a slight delay between moving the mouse and seeing a response on the screen…  Nothing too serious, but it was annoying.

Of course, that was in the opening village.  The little tutorial town.  There wasn’t much going on around there, not much to tax my computer.

As I progressed through the game, the environments became more complex and the visuals more demanding.  I had to tweak settings a little bit with each new area I entered…  Slowly sacrificing eyecandy for playability.

I’ve turned off HDR, and shadows, and reflection, and light rays, and anti-aliasing.  I’ve lowered the texture quality, and the resolution.  I’ve limited the amount of frames rendered ahead, and I’ve turned off vsync.  I’m shutting down every single thing that runs in the background.  And my machine is still struggling with Divinity II.

The game is generally playable, if slow.  But it doesn’t look nearly as good as it did in the opening sections – which is disappointing, because it should really look better than it did in those simple areas.

But, if I’m playing as a dragon and I get set on fire, I’m basically dead.  It isn’t that the fireballs do craptons of damage – it’s the flame effect that kills my computer.  While I’m on fire my game becomes unplayably slow.  The screen basically freezes in place.  I can’t do anything until the flames die out…  But I’m still getting attacked while I wait.  And, generally, I die out before the flames do.

So, we’re getting upgrades.  Put together a nice list of parts on Newegg and ordered the stuff last night.  It should, hopefully, arrive by this weekend.  And I can’t wait to see what these new beasts can do…

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m not very happy with Charter.

We’ve had their Internet service for years…  And it generally works OK…  But when it doesn’t work it’s nearly impossible to get anything done about it.

Their 800 number takes you to a call center somewhere, and they’ve got absolutely no idea what’s going on at a local level.  So they’ll walk you through rebooting your modem (repeatedly) and insist that there’s something wrong with your wireless and whatever else…  And eventually you’ll find out from somebody else that there was a line down or a server blew up.

Their DNS servers are so unreliable that I’ve completely given up on them, and I’m using OpenDNS and Google DNS in our house.

And I never, ever get the speed I should be getting.  Even after accounting for the typical overhead in an Ethernet connection…  I’m still not getting the speed I should be.

But we’ve been using DirecTV for the last couple of years.  It’s been pretty good…  Good picture, reliable even in foul weather…  I absolutely love having a DVR, and the program guide…  We’ve been pretty happy with DirecTV.

Except for their billing.  We’ve had no end of problems with their billing.

We were quoted one price…  And then wound up paying a different one…  And then they started charging us for HD access we couldn’t use…  And every time you change something you get locked in to another two-year contract…  And they kept raising their rates…  Very frustrating.

Eventually it got to the point where we were paying over $100 for DirecTV, and Charter was offering a similar package for just $70…  So we thought we’d switch to Charter and save some money.

Big mistake.

Charter came and did their install last week…  The “basic” television we’ve got on two of our TVs is downright primitive.  Straight-up, simple, analog cable TV.  No guide or anything.  I figured that when we bought their “digital” package for all the TVs in the house, we’d at least get a program guide on those two TVs.  But we don’t.

The DVR we’ve got on our nice TV looks truly ancient.  It’s a big, clunky, silver Scientific Atlanta box that looks like it was manufactured sometime in the 80′s.  Big, green LCD showing the time.  Lots of chunky buttons all over the front of it.  And the remote control is absolutely studded with buttons – most of which don’t appear to do anything.

The software on the DVR looks like some nasty GeoCities-era web page.  Big, clunky tables with heavily-beveled edges…  Bright, contrasting colors…  Rough, pixelated fonts…  Very simple CP437-esque graphics…  Really, really ugly stuff.

But it isn’t just a matter of appearances.  There’s a lot of functionality that seems to be missing.  We don’t seem to be able to search for things like we could on our DirecTV box…  And we can’t seem to record/manage an entire series at a time…  You can’t do much from the program guide…  There doesn’t seem to be as much information about what is showing…  I suppose it’s possible that functionality is actually in there somewhere, but we can’t find it.

And the reception isn’t even clear.  On our two basic TVs we’ve got static showing up on a number of channels.  On our HD DVR TV we keep getting blocks of pixelation and weird sound artifacts.  Last night the volume slowly drifted from too quiet to too loud, all on its own, independent of commercial breaks.  We were constantly having to adjust the volume up and down.

So, we called up DirecTV…  Talked to somebody in their retention department…  Got a new deal.  $70/month for an HD DVR and two basic receivers – but those basic receivers will at least have the programming guide.  They’ll be installing the DirecTV stuff this afternoon…

And, when I get home tonight, I’ll be calling Charter to cancel our TV service.

That Mine OS/Minecraft server I set up a few days ago has failed.

I really don’t think it’s the software…  I mean, there isn’t really all that much to Mine OS.  Just a minimal Linux install, Java runtime, and the Minecraft server itself.  Not a whole lot of moving parts to break.

I think it more likely that the hardware itself is simply failing.

The machine I was using is a mongrel that’s at least 10 years old…  Some of it (case, power supply, and fans) goes back to 1999 or so.  The motherboard and HDD are from somewhere around 2003 or ’04.  The CPU and RAM would be the newest things in it, but they’re from 2006 or so.

We put our old computers out to pasture in 2008 or so, when I built our current machines.  I re-built one of them to act as our home server, running Windows Server 2008.  It’s functional, but just barely.  There isn’t a whole lot of room available for it to do much more than run its OS and share out the files and printers.

This computer was originally re-built as a basic Netflix streaming box, and plugged in to our TV upstairs.  But once we had Windows XP running on it, and some antivirus, it really wasn’t doing a very good job of simply streaming Netflix.  It was very jerky, very slow, very stuttery.  We gave up on it, and the computer has been gathering dust ever since.

So, I suppose it isn’t very surprising that it’s failing now.  The HDD, especially, has definitely outlived my expectations.

Unfortunately, we lost some progress in Minecraft.

I’d been doing daily backups and archives…  But that wasn’t quite enough.  We wound up losing several hours worth of work.  Not a huge problem…  But kind of discouraging anyway.

I’ve got our world up and running on my own machine again, which is less-than-idea…  But I don’t have any other good ideas.  We don’t have any more spare computers lying around.  So this will have to do for now.

Spent last night putting together a new Minecraft server.

I dug out an old computer…  Exact same hardware as the last machine I tried to run a Minecraft server on…  But this time I loaded it up with Mine OS, instead of Windows Server 2008.

Now, I’m not bashing Server 2008…  We’ve got it on several machines at work and it does just fine.  But that old box I’ve got at home just barely manages to run Server 2008, and there really wasn’t much left over for Minecraft.

Mine OS, on the other hand, is downright tiny.  Hardly has any footprint at all.  Leaves almost all the hardware available for Minecraft, and it’s running great.

Had a little trouble getting everything working correctly…

The basic installation instructions are presented in a YouTube video, which was vaguely hard to follow.  I much prefer straight-up text.  Had to rewind a couple times to see things that I’d missed.  And some of the steps were kind of glossed-over.

And then there were a few snags I ran in to, that we’re clearly documented.

But it’s up and running now, and working great.  Much better than running the server on my own machine.

Slashdot | Putting up with Consolitis

Perhaps the most obvious indicator of consolitis, a poor control scheme can single-handedly ruin the PC version of a game and should become apparent after a short time spent playing. Generally this has to do with auto-aim in a shooter or not being able to navigate menus with the mouse. Also, not enough hotkeys in an RPG — that one’s really annoying. … Possibly the most disastrous outcome of an industry-wide shift to console-oriented development is that technological innovation will be greatly slowed. Though a $500+ video card is considered top of the line, a $250 one will now play pretty much any game at the highest settings with no problem. (Maybe that’s what everyone wanted?) Pretty soon, however, graphics chip makers won’t be able to sustain their rate of growth because the software is so far behind, which will be bad for gamers on consoles as well as PC.

Definitely a very real problem.

I don’t think anybody minds being able to play AAA titles with a midrange video card…  But the assumption is that everybody is running on a console of some sort, and this drives some fundamental decisions that just don’t work on the PC.

Graphics wind up getting capped at HDTV resolutions, and PC gamers are unable to take advantage of their much higher resolution monitors.

Inventory systems get removed or dumbed-down to accommodate console gamers that lack a mouse.

Control systems are simplified until they work well on a gamepad – often involving some kind of chording or the use of an analog stick that can be simultaneously depressed.  And PC gamers wind up being unable to bind controls to arbitrary keys or mouse buttons, or wind up having to use awkward controls that just don’t work right on a keyboard and mouse.

Save systems are designed around the limitations of a console, usually meaning that you can only save at certain places.  Or maybe you can’t manually save at all and you have to wait for a checkpoint to be triggered.

Game mechanics break when you can suddenly turn through a full 360-degrees almost instantly, instead of slowly rotating at whatever speed the game designers intended.  Or maybe they’ve still got some kind of aim-assistance code, that is now completely un-necessary with the precision of a mouse pointer.