Songs I want to see in Rock Band or Guitar Hero

Since now both GH and RB are full-band games, these are some songs I would so LOVE to see in these games.

“Reason” by Hoobastank
“Cars” By Fear Factory w/ Gary Numan
“Crawling” By Linkin Park
“Whip It” By Devo
“The Reflex” by Duran Duran
“New Moon on Monday” by Duran Duran

Yeah I know “One Step Closer” will be in Rock Band 2 (SHUT UP WHEN I’M TALKING TO YOU!!) and there’s already some Duran Duran DLC for Rock Band, I DLed them and they are fucking HARD on guitar/expert. My biggest problem with those songs is that what I’m doing with the guitar dosen’t seem like it’s apart of the song, as if the guitar’s volume is potted down so much you barely hear it, and it feels so disconnected when I’m trying to play it.  It’s weird when you play Bass, or Drums you hear those notes louder than when you were playing it on guitar, or any other instrument you’re not using.  I don’t know if the game knows this and increases the volume for that track or if it’s just my brain filtering out everything else.

Open Life Grid

I spent some time on the Open Life Grid (OLG), and there are some basic problems that should be resolved. Once you figured out how to customize your body shape (it’s not apparent at first) they will NOT stay with you when you relog in. Once you log in again you’re “ruthed” even though it shows you’re wearing the body shape you created, it just isn’t loaded. You’ll have to load in another body shape and then switch back in order to see it properly.

Every time I login to OLG it thinks I’m wearing white pants, when I know for a fact I was nude when I logged out. The only thing it seems to remember after logout is my hairstyle. Also the default skin you get is actually not too bad looking when nude, you actually have nipples instead of a faint discolored spot you normally get on SL. You also get a belly button, but no genitalia is rendered, nor pubic hair.

I was able to replicate my avatar’s body shape from SL into OLG value for value by being logged into both running two instances of the viewer. It would be nice if there was an import/export of body shapes that just exported the raw numbers in a text file that could be easily loaded in. Considering that the technology of Linden Labs is now open source and so many other organizations are created their own virtual worlds now, this would be a nice thing to have.

One big problem I kept running into was my avatar would just VANISH when I’m trying to edit and adjust an object I have attached to my avatar. Apparently zooming into my avatar and passing the camera though my avatar results in the avatar just vanishing. Sometimes it may flicker back into view for a moment as you walk around, transmission into another sim, or pull your camera view far away my avatar will reappear off in the far distance. At first I though it was because of the viewer that OLG has available. But when using the Linden Labs Second Life official viewer on the Open Life Grid still had the same problems.

Attachments don’t remain on your avatar once you log off. In fact if you tried to edit any attached object on it, none of the changes you made will keep. It won’t even remember what attachment point you selected on your avatar. It always seems to default to your avatars left hand. If you resized it, changed color, or anything will be forgotten.

You’re also given a big lump sum of L$ I have 10,000L on me right now, but I could have sworn that when I first logged in I started with only 1000L. So maybe it they give you 9k after you’ve logged in a few more times? Also uploading assets is only 5L compared to doubled that on SL.

OLG has a different way of handling avatars and your account. When you create an account at OLG, you’re not creating your avatar login, you’re creating a master account for the OLG website. Once you have that set up, you can then create your avatar logins and passwords all under one master account, and it seems you can make as many avatars as you like. You can also type in your own last names for your avatars, instead of choosing last names from a small drop down list. So if you ever wanted to be a Linden, go for it! Though I’ve not actually tested if you CAN use “Linden” as a sir name; I’ve not seen anyone in OLG using it. I’m sure they filter out foul words for first and last names, but I’ve not bothered to test that.

 

Lively by Google sucks!

My gawd this is the most confusing environment I’ve ever had the misfortune to use. You’d think coming from the likes a Google that user friendliness would be paramount, and that it would have an intuitive user interface; nuh-uh, nope.

The window you get is EXTREMELY tiny and is NOT resizeable.  You can detach it into a small movable window that’s slightly smaller but it feels very cramped especially when you’re using the interface to edit your avatar’s apperance. The camera is hard to control and thats the biggest issue I have with this.  Sure SL’s camrea controls are hard to learn but once you DO learn it’s amazing and becomes second nature to use, like riding a bike.  This is so counter-intuitive it goes beyond frustrating.

When you first start your instinct is to press your arrow keys around and walk around, and you’ll soon lose your own avatar (assuming you’ve ever seen it in the first place) and gawd knows what the hell you’ll be looking at. But really all you want to do is move your avatar around and explore!  The arrow keys don’t control your avatar, it controls your camera view in a BACKWARDS manor. If you want to look up, you press down, if you want to look at things at your left, you have to press right. It’s designed by a bunch of dyslexics!  Plus you have to press a combination of CTRL, Alt, or SHIFT with the arrow keys to get different camera movements. What were these guys smoking when they developed these retarded controls?

To move your avatar you have to click and drag your avatar as if it was an icon on your desktop.  This is incredibly stupid since once you finally get the camera positioned just as you want it, click and dragging your avatar snaps the camera view back and away into a view that reminds me of playing really bad console games with static camera angles you have no control, like those annoying J-RPGs.  You have zero control of the camera, so when you move your avi far away it reposition it in a predetermined position.  And with the screen so small, and the bad angle you have no fucking idea what direction you’re going. But even when you get the hang of this, you realize there’s very little to explore.

Fortunately the environments you find your self in are extremely small. It’s not like other MMOs where it’s one big world you can (theoretically) walk from one end to the other. On Lively, you have separated themed chartrooms. You’d think Google would be more innovative with this, since this nothing newer than IRC channels, and AOL chartrooms that we have already had for nearly 20 years now.  Common areas like a singles area and high school for kids, an adult dance club that looks like a strip bar but there’s no nudity as far as I can see… as well as TV show themed places like Lost.  There are a LOT of foreign places, mostly Brazil has a big pretense here. You can also create your own room, when I tried to make mine, it crashed firefox.  Though that might be more of a issue with firefox since I’ve noticed it’s been very flaky with me lately.

To further show how bass-ackards this game is, avatar nametags are under avatar’s FEET on the FLOOR. And if you can barely control your camera angles you won’t see anyones names.  Chat text appears in bubbles, akin to there.com but on this they are all over the place with long rubber banding lines pointing to the avatar (usually off screen) who just said that.  At least There.com don’t have cross-crossing chaotic chat bubbles that looks like a bizarre flowchart from MAD magazine.

Going back to Windows

For a couple weeks I was stuck using Ubuntu (8.02 x64) to get on SL.  My main windows PC was kaput and I just recently got it working again (new Mobo and PSU), and it’s a bit faster now.  The one thing I’ve noticed in SL is I often crash the client when I’m moving my camera around really fast across areas (ALT-CLICK-DRAG).  You can feel it about to crash when the game freezes for a moment, and you get the crash logger.  On ubuntu it does the same thing and it freezes too, but it dosen’t crash.  It seems to recover from the rapid juggling of textures and just keeps going. Where as windows just falls over and crashes, which if this happens too often you’ll need to clear out your texture cache (prefrences – networking – clear cache)

There is a lot to be said for the stability of Linux in general, but the actual usefulness of Linux towards end users isn’t as much as windows has established it self as. With the different flavors of Linux (and different choices for X) just dilutes how useful Linux can be since you don’t really have to worry if a particular app or driver will work with your flavor of windows as much as you do with the different distros of Linux (and Unix, BSD, and MacOS).

The biggest problem I had with Ubuntu and Second Life was that while it ran OKAY, it didn’t run as smooth as it shold as it did with Windows XP.  This apparently has to do with how the drivers are install in ubuntu.  If you use the internal automaticly updated nvidia drivers in ubuntu (and having to manually enable them) they don’t run at full tilt, and have some bugs.  When I minimize the viewer and restore it, the screen goes completly black and it’s bascially locked up.  there a little more going on than just that, but the result is you’re SOL, and just closing the viewer is an activity in futility.  It’s quicker to just reboot your PC to get back to a normal state of things.

Apparently if you install the drivers with out X running (pure console mode in root) the drivers that Nvidia supplies are more robust and less buggy, and mainly won’t crash SL when you minimize and restore.  But trying to acctually DO this is a pain in the FUCKING ASS.  Ubuntu dosen’t really have a simple way to exit out of the gui and drop into the shell, ru root, to just do this.  Even then you have “runlevels” you have to change so things run proper, but ubuntu renumber thier runlevels diffrent from the rest of the linux world since “init 3″ launches GNU, instead of just giving me network access on the command line.  ARG!  I’m no linux expert but I’ve been using MS-DOS since the early 90s, and even in the 80s I was using command line OS’s so im no stranger to the text screen. But for fucks sakes xUnix command line is a pain.