05.11.08

EA doesn’t get piracy

Posted in General at 9:28 pm by jw

If you haven’t noticed, EA has decided to put some particularly burdensome restrictions on their big pair of games due out later this year on the PC: Spore and Mass Effect.  Essentially the game itself registers with EA, and then checks every 10 days to make sure EA still lets you run the game on your PC.  Not only that, but you only get 3 activations on different machines and it’s completely unclear if you can actually uninstall to get an activation back.  To summarize, here’s how it all works for a legitimate customer:

  1. Buy the game at the store.
  2. Install the game.
  3. Run the game.
  4. The game asks for your “Activation code”.
  5. The game sends this activation code, along with an identifier based on your computer to EA.
  6. EA marks off the activation with the identifier and returns “ok”, if it hasn’t seen more than 2 other identifiers.
  7. At least every 10 days, the game sends the activation code and identifier back to EA and if EA sees the activation and code in its database then it sends back “ok”.
  8. If the game hasn’t had an “ok” in the last 10 days then it refuses to run.

The problem is this has a lot of potential failure modes for the end user that will limit their experience and sour their opinion of EA:

  • The end user may legitimately not have access to the internet for 10 days and will be locked out of their single player game through no fault of their own.
  • The end user may upgrade their machine, or legitimately install it on different machines they own thus using up their 3 activations (this happened a lot to people that bought Bioshock).
  • There is no apparent way to remove an activation once you’ve used it.
  • Despite assurances from Bioware that they will release a patch to disable this check if they turn off the activation servers, it means we have to trust them when they are making it very, very clear that they don’t trust us.

What’s a bigger issue is EA’s bought into Macrovision’s lies that schemes like this will limit their “losses” to piracy (which is a debateable point anyway given everyone I know that pirates games would never buy the game if it wasn’t available to download in the first place).  The sum effect is it will increase the support costs of EA in dealing with this activation stupidity while doing nothing to combat the pirates who will end up with a better product.  Here’s the same timeline for a pirate:

  1. Download the game.
  2. Install the game.
  3. Run the game.
  4. There is no 4.  The game just runs and doesn’t bug you any more.

Get it now?  The pirated product has more to offer the end user because it doesn’t hinder their enjoyment of the product or have the same sort of failure modes that the legitimate version has.  Putting restrictions into a product that only hinder the legitimate users isn’t the way to stop piracy – put in online stuff that rewards people for buying the game and you’ll go a LOT further.


Update: EA has backed down on both Spore and Mass Effect and removed the “every 10 days” thing after the large number of complaints that came through.  The new policy requires you to have the CD in the drive when you activate.  The down side is that you are still limited to 3 activations, but EA says that getting more is just a matter of a phone call (much like XP or Vista).

EA still doesn’t get piracy, but it seems they sure do get public opinion on invasive DRM.

01.18.08

Taking the “smarts” out of Vista’s Explorer

Posted in Shorts at 9:40 pm by jw

Saw this in Google today and had to post it – it’s the solution to the thing that’s annoyed me the most about Vista so far:

“cquirke (MVP Windows shell/user)” <cquirkenews@nospam.mvps.org> wrote in
message news:tnls03ldgjlm6v2ffnd5o7ocml63ot8p73@4ax.com…
>
> To me, these frills are almost more hassle than they are worth. I
> want List view everywhere, with a minimum of unsolicited content
> groping, but that is at odds with the direction of Vista’s quest to
> “make it easier” and be more effective/powerful.
>

Set the list view for a folder that’s using the ‘All Items’ template, then
use ‘Apply to Folders’. Then override content-sniffing with my ‘AllFolders’
regedit:

Copy the text between the lines below into notepad & save as a .reg file.
Watch out for line wrap — [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\…\Shell] is all one line,
there is a space between ‘Local’ and ‘Settings’.

————————————————–
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local
Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Bags\AllFolders\Shell]
“FolderType”=”NotSpecified”

————————————————–

Merging the .reg file will set the ‘All Items’ template for any folders that
don’t currently have a view saved with a different template. You can clear
all saved views by deleting the

“HKCU\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Bags”

key BEFORE merging the .reg file. If any folders open with a different
template after clearing the ‘Bags’ key & merging the .reg file, they most
likely have a template specified via their desktop.ini file.

Source

01.09.08

Crysis, Hellgate, Orange Box, EQ2, Guild Wars and more

Posted in General at 3:01 pm by jw

Been a while since I’ve posted on the games I’ve been playing recently so here’s a long post in the making.  With my new-ish PC, things are pretty good in the gaming world!

Crysis

After playing Far Cry for a long time a few years back, I was quite excited by this game as it approached release.  Strangely enough though, after I picked up my copy from Best Buy it took me quite some time to actually get into playing it – there always seemed to be something else taking up my time (usually Guild Wars or Hellgate, but more on those later).  Once I really started in earnest though, it was almost impossible to play anything else until I’d played my way through it.

In summary, this game is amazing.  The quality of the graphics is absolutely stunning – rendering trees right down to the leaves, being able to crawl through the underbrush, having enemies actually behave somewhat intelligently (retreating to cover and calling friends in to help) and the relatively common modern theme of regenerating health fits in very well.  The “special powers” you have with your combat suit are very well balanced and offer a bunch of different solutions to every problem you come across.  I think I’d be happy replaying this sometime in the future and the game almost certainly would play differently if I chose to focus on a different set of tactics.

Despite there being some negativity around about the game’s performance, I had no real issues (except for having to restart the game once the snow scene kicked in to clean things out for some reason and triple my frame rate).  I could run everything but shadows on the highest quality settings and it was good to see a real performance boost from running the 64 bit client over the 32 bit one.  It was interesting to see that it barely used the second core of the CPU while playing, though I read somewhere that it helped out when you had lots of particle effects flying around.

My only real complaint is that it seemed to end too soon.  Far Cry must have taken me weeks to work my way through and really seemed like it was never going to stop for quite a while, but Crysis only lasted for 4 or 5 days of playtime.  I was left at the end with a cliffhanger, and thinking “maybe there’s more after these credits roll”.  Oh well – I still look forward to a sequel.

Hellgate:London

Hellgate was the second game I’d been really looking forward to towards the end of last year but unlike Crysis which lived up to every bit of the hype put to it, I found Hellgate a little lacking. 

My initial choice of character was a Blademaster, and this was probably a little unfortunate as it seems to be one of the less enjoyable classes to play – you spend a lot of time worrying about your health and how you can afford the next round of medkits after taking a bunch of melee damage from the fact you have to get right up on top of your opponents to take them down.  Towards the end, things just became a little silly and I spent about four hours on the final level in a pure “take monster down 2%, die, run back, take it down another 2%, die, etc.” festival of annoyance.  Not at all a fun experience and I only put up with it because I really just wanted to finish the game by that stage.

Fortunately, I decided that not everything could be quite that painful in the game so I started up a new character as an Engineer and the whole game changed.  The Engineer was basically self-sufficient and I had a lot of fun this second time through creating swarms of robots that cleared out pretty much everything in sight.  As a strong contrast, I only died once in the final level and the whole thing was a much more enjoyable experience.  The game as an Engineer was fun!

Overall though, the limits to computer generated levels do show themselves.  Things looked very much the same was you went to “different” places in London.  While you’d expect to see certain landmarks, things were basically just a slightly different layout using the same tilesets as you’d seen before.  I guess I should have expected this from Diablo which did much the same thing, but it seemed more repetitive than what I remember of Diablo and you eventually just thought “oh, another subway level” instead of “hey – this really could be Whitehall in a post-apocolyptic future”.  Disappointing really.

I didn’t subscribe to the online thing.  I already have a subscription to EQ2 and I’m not about to subscribe to more than one game at once.  I’m not really sure I would get the same enjoyment out of it that I do from a true MMOG.

Orange Box

Whatever you think of first person shooters, Portal and Team Fortress 2 make this package amazingly good.  Portal is essentially a puzzle game where you use your portal gun to solve problems.  It has beautiful graphics, a quirky and fun plotline, closing credits that are absolutely worth sitting all the way through and challenges you can work your way through after finishing the basic game.  This game itself is a revolution in first-person gameplay.

Team Fortress 2 is one of the few online multiplayer games I can handle playing.  It’s completely tossed the realism out the window for cartoonish fun, and I really do mean “fun”.  You can’t take yourself too seriously when you’re a cartoon figure that runs around beating up, shooting, healing and generally causing mayhem with other cartoon figures – and that make a massive difference to someone pretty casual (and pretty poorly skilled) at first person shooters as I am.  It may have been seven years in the making, but it shows because it’s worth all seven of them

To add to those two gems, Half Life 2 Episode 2 is also a lot of fun and a worthy sequel to HL2 itself and HL2ep1.  The plot moves forward, it takes some thought to work your way through a few of the levels (as opposed to mindless blowing up aliens) and overall things are quite challenging but not over-the-top difficult either.  Achievements add an extra bit of fun to the side while playing, so it’s another good part.

Overall, a great combination but a little annoying that I feel I’ve paid for HL2 and HL2ep1 twice now.  I still have to find someone to “gift” my extra copies to – will probably see if any of my family wants them when I get back to Australia.

EQ2: Rise of Kunark

Rise of Kunark is without doubt the best Everquest 2 expansion to date.  For those of us who were around in EQ1 for the Kunark expansion, this new release for the EQ2 world contains a ridiculous amount of new content but also does an excellent job of drawing the feel of the original Kunark zones into the EQ2 world.  A tiered raid system gives those of us that are no longer hard-core raiders a nice long progression of challenges to look forward to as we move through the world, and the number of single group and solo quests gives a lot for everyone to do.  A must for any EQ2 player!

Guild Wars

I know this is an old game, but since my wife saw it on my machine and demanded her own copy, she hasn’t been able to stop herself from playing it.  As a result, I’m playing it a lot more too and it’s definitely good fun for a solo or small group of people to hang out and mess around in.  If you’re looking for a good online and persistant world that doesn’t require subscriptions but has a wealth of content then it really would be hard to look past Guild Wars.  It’s really just a lot of good and simple fun!

So far I’ve completed the Prophecies missions and have started working on Factions with a different character.  I got Nightfall for Christmas and have to work on that sometime as well (in between everything else), and Eye of the North is just way out there at the moment.  Plenty of time though and I like the idea of being able to do it all solo or duo at my own pace.

Guitar Hero

I know this isn’t my usual PC game, but I picked up Guitar Hero (80’s version if you must know specifically) for the Playstation and it’s just great fun.  Feels more like playing a bass than a real guitar (more fingering than chords) but for a lot of fun in a very non-traditional context for video games, this is a hard one to go past.  For anyone who remembers back to their school days and the rock bands they may have been in or wished they were in then this is something great to kick back and enjoy.

Misc

For variety, I’ve been messing with some older games on my system.  Dragged out Lego Star Wars for a quick game just because I was having fun with it over at a friend’s place.  Spent a few evenings playing around with Galactic Civilizations II and its two expansions – a fun turn based space strategy game, and have been spending too much time messing with Grobots and not really getting anywhere much.  I’ve been thinking of trying out a 14 day test with Eve Online, but not entirely sure about it yet – the space simulation bit interests me but I’m not really into the whole PvP thing.

The Future

Moving back to Australia is probably going to cut into a lot of my time, but with a month off work and my wife heading back before me, I’ll probably manage to dig out some spare time between packing and inventorying to play a few games.  I still have a lot of real time strategy games to complete and just as many flight simulators that I always seem to want to play but never make the effort to find room for my joystick lately (stupid small apartment).  I can’t think of anything new on the horizon that I’m looking forward to, so probably just a good time to catch up on all those things I meant to do but never did.

12.22.07

Converting AVIs for my Zune

Posted in General at 8:21 pm by jw

It’s been a while, a few things I need to update, but I’m going to do this one first because it will probably interest the most random people out there. Recently I got myself a new Zune so I could watch my DVR’d BSG episodes while on a treadmill trying to get fit. I love the device – it has a nice big screen (about twice the size of a comparable iPod), 80G of storage and a pretty slick interface. Sadly, the PC software leaves a little to be desired though.

In any case, the Zune can only play WMV and simple MP4 video. The PC software automatically converts a bunch of different file formats for you into something the Zune can play (ie WMV) but wouldn’t understand AVI files, particularly ones that use the XVid codec.

I figured it shouldn’t be too hard to find something that would do the conversion for me and a quick search of Google told me there were quite a few products there that promised to make everything easy and magically do the conversion for me. They mostly cost about $30, but if I was going to spend money I really wanted something that would fit all my personal criteria:

  • Zune native format – no second conversion by the Zune application after I’ve done my own conversions.
  • Batch encoding – I want to point it at a whole bunch of files and just let it go.
  • Low priority – I want to be able to run the conversion in the background and not have to fight with it when I want CPU power for something else.
  • Multithreaded – I have a dual core CPU. Why not use it?
  • MP4 format with H.264 encoding – why not use the best format the Zune supports?
  • Keep the original frame rate – there’s no point converting 25fps to 30fps or vice versa.
  • No black bars – if the original was 1.7:1 then just make another 1.7:1 video instead of putting black bars. The Zune can handle it.
  • Reduce to 320x? – may as well reduce the resolution to the Zune’s native display.
  • Able to cope with minor damage to the input files (some of my DVR’d files aren’t that good http://tabsmall.com/cialis-otc/)

Honestly, I didn’t think any of those were particularly much to ask from a conversion program. The later iPods support a very similar set of features to the Zune so I expected the conversion programs would easily do what I wanted. Sadly, it wasn’t to be. Here’s a list of the apps I tried and where I found their failings were:

Cucusoft’s Zune Video Converter

Not too bad a product, but wouldn’t let me set an automatic frame rate (defaulted to NTSC), and insisted on putting black bars at the top and bottom of letterboxes. Failed to handle any input file errors, and was no ability to set the priority to default to low.

Xilisoft’s Zune Video Converter

Seemed pretty good, but again no automatic frame rate detection. Setting the encoder to H.264 produced a file that wasn’t playable on the Zune and had to be converted a second time. Didn’t cope with any input file errors and there was no ability to set the priority to low.

Imtoo’s Zune Video Converter

This was exactly the same program as the Xilisoft one. Go figure.

PQDVD’s Zune Video Converter

Seemed the best of the bunch – handled input file errors with no problem but didn’t seem to want to remember the previous encoder settings so you had to go back and specify H.264 every time. There was no automatic frame rate detection either, and the priority (again) couldn’t be set to low.

Free iPod Video Converter

I had great hopes for this one – it automatically kept the frame rate for me and promised H.264 encoding. The wizard interface was a little clunky but livable. Videos converted played fine in the PC player and transferred without conversion to the Zune but just gave an error when I tried to play them.

Nero Recode

I actually own Nero 8, so I gave Nero Recode a try. It seemed to do very well when using the iPod profile but when I finally got to play it on the device, it had trimmed the video to the left side rather than letterboxing it. The trim controls were strangely complex so I just gave up.

Windows Media Encoder

Promised a lot, but didn’t really deliver. Figuring out how to rescale the video and keep the frame rate turned out to be close to impossible and would have left me making a new conversion profile for every different type of file. Not something I really wanted to do.

Various Doom9 Solutions

The hard-core converters were a bit of a disappointment. As I expected they all had a whole bunch of controls but none really seemed to work as well as even the basic commercial ones above. Made me kinda sad because Doom9 has previously been a great resource for ripping my DVDs to media files for playing on my PC!

So, disappointed with all of these offerings, I decided to sit down and try to use the Windows Media Encoder APIs to do the whole thing myself. After a few hours work with the SDK and Visual Studio 2005 (it crashes with 2008 – go figure), I had something actually encoding to a .wmv file, but I ended up running against the same problems I had with Windows Media Encoder – you needed to build the profile up from scratch for every variation in the input file which really made it more work than I wanted to put in right then.

Finally, I was looking at the freeware H.264 encoder (x264) and noticed it was on the same site as one of my favorite open source media players (VLC). Looking more into VLC I found out that it can also transcode files, and noticed that .mp4 was one of the outputs. From there, it was all a matter of figuring out the arcane command line incantation to get it to produce an mp4 that the Zune itself was happy to play. Finally it all worked out and I ended up with the attached 4NT script: makezune.btm

Works like a charm! Go go VLC.

Edit: I’ve been asked by a couple of people to write a version of the script file that runs in the regular XP/Vista command shell, so here it is. I even threw in a couple of comments to make life a little easier! makezune2.cmd

Edit #2: Note that this solution only works with the Zune v2.0 (4/8/80G) and not the original 30G Zunes which can only play .wmv files. To get those to work is probably going to involve some heavy tinkering with the Windows Media Encoder libraries.

Edit #3: So I put the time in to actually tinker with the Windows Media Encoder. After finding Alex Zambelli’s upgraded WMCmd.vbs (local link) script, it was a relatively simple matter of trial and error to find the parameters needed to make a file compatible with the Zune. The real problem was figuring out the scaling. Fortunately, some really ugly batch file scripting came to the rescue and the final product is in makezune3.cmd

Note: For any attached file, use right click, save link as… and then rename it to the proper name. To avoid issues with downloads of script files being prevented by Internet Explorer, I’ve actually stored everything as text files.

09.29.07

Rosy Tomorrow’s

Posted in General at 10:05 pm by jw

Just a quick note while I’m out in Connecticut for the weekend (will post more on that this week) – I had the best steak and baked potato I can remember ever eating in the US at Rosy Tomorrow’s in Danbury.  Still in heaven over that steak.

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