When logging onto battle.net from Diablo II, simply switch your realm to "Classic Beta" to download the update.
Speaking of battle.net, don't forget to register with them for the beta tests of the upcoming Starcraft II!
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Diablo II 1.13
The wait is over, folks. (Well, kinda). Blizzard is now officially distributing the beta version of the Diablo II 1.13 patch and here is how to download it!
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Some Starcraft Mods
Up for some Starcraft? Here are some conversion mods for the aging computer game to make it a bit more lively to pick up and play again.
This game mods the Protoss graphics back to what they looked like in the Beta Phase of the game.
This mod is in spanish, be warned. It is a lofty mod that attempts to add the units and features of Starcraft II to the original game.
More information about this mod can be found here:
This mod converts the Terran Science Vessel to it's Pre-Beta appearance.
More to come soon. Enjoy.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
RPG Design Competition
RPG Superstar™ 2010 Open Call for New Design Talent
Competition Starts December 4, 2009 on paizo.com
Paizo Publishing, LLC® is proud to announce RPG Superstar 2010, the third season of its popular RPG design contest. The search for the newest talent in RPG design begins in early December on paizo.com.
"I couldn’t be more pleased at the success of RPG Superstar since its launch two years ago," said Lisa Stevens, CEO of Paizo Publishing, "Not only do we have thousands of fans eagerly awaiting the launch of this year’s RPG Superstar, but we have managed to find a number of key contributors for our products and even hired Rob McCreary, one of 2008’s Top 4 contestants. This year’s contest could find next year’s most talked about author—I can’t wait!"
Fans selected Neil Spicer as 2009’s RPG Superstar, voting his creations through five rounds of intensive competition to ultimately select his adventure proposal as the best submission in a contest that started with hundreds of aspiring designers. Spicer’s winning adventure, Realm of the Fellnight Queen, releases in January as a full-color printed Pathfinder Module.
Starting at 2 PM Pacific Time on December 4, 2009, contestants will be able to submit their RPG Superstar entry at paizo.com/rpgsuperstar. For the first round, that entry will be a wondrous item designed for use with Paizo's Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. Each entry must be 300 words or less, and must include all of the proper mechanics and flavor. Contestants must submit their entry by January 1, 2010. Judges will select the top 32 entries to be announced on January 19, 2010; those 32 contestants will be assigned a new design task and their entries will be posted on paizo.com for the public to read, critique, and vote on. The designers garnering the most votes in each round will continue on to subsequent rounds, and the ultimate winner will earn a paid commission to write one of Paizo's upcoming Pathfinder Modules!
Paizo has selected three judges to oversee the competition. This year, Paizo Managing Editor F. Wesley Schneider and Developer Sean K Reynolds join veteran RPG Superstar and Necromancer Games co-owner Clark Peterson. These judges will critique each round's entries before the public vote.
In addition, this season will also feature guest judges chosen for their insight on specific themes for each round. For the Open Call round, last year's RPG Superstar Final 4 (Eric Bailey, Kevin Carter, Neil Spicer, and Matthew Stinson) will provide their advice to this year's top 32 contestants. Additional high-profile game professionals will serve as guest judges for each upcoming round.
As the contest progresses, the public will decide which talented designers succeed by discussing the entries and voting for their favorite contestants each round on paizo.com.
Specifics for each challenge will be announced as each round begins. The winner of RPG Superstar 2010 will be announced on March 23, 2010.
Complete rules and submission form are available at paizo.com/rpgsuperstar.
Do you have what it takes to be the next RPG Superstar? Go to paizo.com/rpgsuperstar and start your journey now!
ABOUT PAIZO PUBLISHING
Paizo Publishing®, LLC is a leading publisher of fantasy roleplaying games, accessories, board games, and novels. Paizo's Pathfinder® line of rules, adventures, sourcebooks, and campaigns combines decades of game design experience into one evocative system compatible with the 3.5 rules. Paizo's GameMastery® accessories offer easy-to-use tools aimed at improving the tabletop RPG experience. Paizo's board game imprint unleashes fun, challenging games like Kill Doctor Lucky™ and Yetisburg™ that appeal to both families and casual gamers alike. Paizo's Planet Stories® line of science fiction and fantasy novels promise thrilling adventure of the like not seen since the legendary pulps. Paizo.com is the leading online hobby retail store, offering tens of thousands of products from a variety of publishers to customers all over the world. In the seven years since its founding, Paizo Publishing has received more than a dozen major industry awards and has gro wn to become one of the most influential companies in the hobby games industry.
Reposted from an E-Mail I recieved from Paizo.com
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Morrowind Users; Fear Not!
I will be covering Morrowind in upcoming posts. There is so much content to cover and I am swamped with finals in school, I am forced to right now leave you faithful readers with this, a link to get you started in creating a base game for future Morrowind updates.
Till next time, my droogies!
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Dungeons and Dragons Tournament
I know this isn't about video games, but Dungeons and Dragons is the grandfather of all video games, so it deserves to be here. This is an idea I have for my local group, I'm making a big push to get everyone together on the 19th to have an epic tournament. Please comment if you think you will participate. Rules for this tournament are as follows.
The Challenge: Design a Clvl 30 character to compete in a combat tournament similar in premise to Mortal Kombat.
The Rules:
-Use 3.5 rules, epic level progression can be found in the Epic Level Handbook.
-Characters have 570,000gp to spend on whatever they want. (Keep in mind that this is not a campaing, but a series of fights.)
-No penalties for multiclassing. Regardless of how many different actual classes you take, your class levels plus your level adjustments should equate to 30.
-There are no race restrictions, though if the race you choose has an level adjustment, factor that into character level advancement. (A character with an adjusted level of 3 can only gain 27 levels, not 30.)
-Magic items, mundane items, and equipment can be purchased out of any of the WOTC supplements.
-Feats, Classes, and Prestige Classes from any WOTC supplement are acceptable choices. Rules variants are also allowed. Make your character unique!
-All characters gain a template of their choosing at level 20, provided they meet the prerequisites.
-Tournament is scheduled to take place on December 19, 2009.
Suggested reading material: Book of Exalted Deeds, Book of Vile Darkness, Complete Adventurer, Complete Arcane, Complete Champion, Complete Mage, Complete Scoundrel, Complete Warrior, Feat Bible, Item Bible
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Fallout 2 (Thank You Killap & Co.)
Fallout 2. The name brings back such good memories for me. Killing the president with super stimpacks so as not to alert all of the Enclave to my presence, Trying in vain to kill the ghost in The Den for hours, or blasting a hole in the head of that pretentious First Citizen Lynette. It's a great game, it's just a pity that Bethesda had to ruin one of the greatest Dynasties ever. Fallout 2 is my favorite game. It's a game of open ended possibilities. In my current playthrough, I'm at the Enclave and I have yet to kill a single thing.
The must have downloads for this game are just that--must haves. You haven't played Fallout until you have played the Restored (almost) Bug-Free (almost) version.
You should download and Install in this order.
1. Killap's Fallout 2 Restoration project v1.2
-This restores tons of cut content to the game and includes the latest unofficial patch that fixes tons of bugs.
2. Fixes for the Restoration Project not included in the Installer
Just copy the files into the data/scripts folder. They will replace the older files with the same names.
3. Timeslip's latest Sfall (v2.0d)
You will want to go into the ddraw.ini text and replace some of the lines (like city limit fix) with the numbers from the ddraw.ini that comes with the Restoration project. Be sure to back up your files before installation!
4. The Fallout 2 High-Resolution Patch
Be sure to consult the various readme files included with each download, and backup older files before you overwrite them. That is all. Enjoy.
If you have trouble installing the above files, don't panic! Help can be found at the forums of http://nma-fallout.com/ Good luck and God bless.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Aqueous Rift: An Interview with Xenophanes
Anyone remember Aqueous Rift? What about Water Starcraft? They are really the same thing, and for those of you who haven't heard of this amazing project, it was an ambitious mod created to add naval warfare to Starcraft: Brood War. It was never released, but you can view the old website at: http://www.angelfire.com/sc/starcraft1998/wsc/waterSC.html
I wondered how such a seemingly well thought out mod such as this could fail, so I decided to do a little digging. This post is an interview with Xenophanes, the man behind Aqueous Rift. If we get enough hype about this, maybe we can convince him to revive his project! (Maybe, but maybe not.)
Anyway, on to the interview!
Aaron: First, give us a background on how you came onto the Starcraft Modding scene and a rundown of what you had hoped Aqueous Rift would be.
Xenophanes: Basically, I was and always have been a Apple computer person. Blizzard has always supported Mac's, so naturally I was playing WarCraft and WarCraft II back in the day. StarCraft was released and was available to the Macintosh community, however BroodWar was delayed by several months for the Macintosh. This obviously was upsetting to me because I wanted to play BroodWar with my buddies who had PCs. Interestingly, when BroodWar was released Blizzard released an update for the main StarCraft program for both Windows and Mac's. I was looking at the file sizes and the version notes and realized that it was likely that Blizzard prereleased the program that would actually run BroodWar, but it was disguised as an update for StarCraft. Further investigation by burning CDs with various file components made me realize that the StarCraft/BroodWar application was really only responding to the type of data sets available to them when the program was launched. Simply, I was able to "fake" a Macintosh BroodWar CD, replace the patch file with the BroodWar data file and trick StarCraft on the Mac to run BroodWar months before it was supposed to be released for the Mac! I quickly wrote a tutorial on how to do it and spread it through the internet. BroodWar for Mac was released after that, but people were still doing my "trick" because the Mac version of BroodWar was around $30 or so, but the PC version of BroodWar had dropped to $15 by that time. Unfortunately, I received the first of several "cease and desist" letters from Blizzard. They didn't like the fact that they were losing revenue because of a "hack". That was the start of the modding scene for me. Before I knew it I developed all the units that made sense and the only question was putting them into the game. Around that time the mod utilities started showing up. StarDraft was first followed by StarGraft and that was the start we needed. When TileEdit came out we expanded into making new tilesets as well.
Aaron: What made you think of adding an element of naval warfare to a game that puts little to no emphasis on aquatic warfare?
Xenophanes: I was always puzzled a little why StarCraft didn't have any water units because they were so integral to the strategy in WarCraft II. Yeah yeah.... I've heard the reasoning "they don't have to build water ships because they have space ships". Sure, that is true, but last time I checked we have advanced tactical aircraft that can circle the earth not to mention intercontinental ballistic missiles, but we still use aircraft carriers and submarines, so I didn't necessarily buy this logic. So, I started brainstorming as to how and why and what would be StarCraft water units. Why build warships on the ocean? What if there was a planet that was only ocean with no land? How would you live there and defend it? This was the genesis of the idea really.
Aaron: Was it just a series of Custom maps or did you have a Campaign in development?
Xenophanes: We had a full campaign in development. Simply, it was going to be a parallel storyline that was taking place in a "backwater" part of space which consisted of 'wet' planets. For some reason that area of space had an abundance of water, thus the solar systems developed planets with a higher percentage of ocean coverage. We had heroes and a full line of story lined up.
Aaron: Why was your project cancelled?
Xenophanes: The project wasn't really cancelled as so much as it died. I went to graduate school and couldn't continue working on the project full time like I had during college. The people I put in charge couldn't execute the project because they didn't have the capability to put the final touches together. Furthermore, Blizzard sent me two more letters telling me to stop our project. One saying we were violating the terms of agreement by editing the program files and one to say that we were infringing on the copyright by saying "StarCraft: Aqueous Rift" was our title.
Aaron: How far did you actually get before the powers that be at Blizzard Entertainment shut you down?
Xenophanes: We got pretty far. We created GRP files for most of the units although we were constantly editing them trying to make them look as authentic as possible. We created one full tileset and were going through two more (I actually created one more for a different expansion at Campaign Creations that I don't know if it actually got used). We were trying to add them in using StarGraft, but the program was buggy and took a lot of effort. Simply, I had generated a mpq file that contained our GRPs, modified data files, that would be used in conjunction with StarGraft. I had a working alpha that had "fake" grps to test. My crew didn't understand why I was anxious of releasing the good GRPs, but I had already seen other projects get ripped off where someone took their GRP and used it for a different expansion. (GRP's are the actual graphical files that contain the information of what the unit looks like and how it animates.) The biggest issue we ran into was making the water available to units. What we did was to set the lowest level of land to look like water, thus land units could walk on it. Next we changed the unit flags of the water units to that of larvae which can only survive on the creep. We then changed the water to be creep (although it is "land" that looked like water), so any water units (flagged as larvae) would die if they tried to leave the "water". This solved the issue of water units leaving to the land, but to keep land units from going onto the "water" we used map triggers to kill any unit that tried to enter the water above a certain amount. It worked pretty well although it required that all multiplayer games be run using Map settings, so the triggers would be active. We even set up our own Battle Net server that allowed us to run hacked versions of StarCraft! We probably spent too much time goofing around playing StarCraft on our own Bnet server instead of working, but that is the way things go when you get a bunch of people who love a game together. Anyway, we were very serious about making it multiplayer playable and took many steps to make it possible.
Aaron: Can we hope to see anything in the future coming from Aqueous Rift?
Xenophanes: I have been considering trying to revisit AR with StarCraft 2 engine because it looks easier to modify for that type of use, however I am older now with a child and a full time job. Who knows I would be more than happy to help out and give over my ideas for a project if there is a capable crew out there willing to try to make something that matches the look and feel of StarCraft. I personally feel I have a fantastic vision just little time for its execution. Who knows maybe someday I will bring the crew back together and give it another shot.
Aaron: Have you worked on any other modifications for Starcraft, or any other game?
Xenophanes: I did work on the Gundam mod for StarCraft where I ported it to Macintosh. I worked with the guys from the Antioch Chronicles when they were trying to produce their final expansion. They had some issues trying to add the units and GRP creation. I think that ultimately failed although they had some really sweet units. In fact, the only expansion/mod that I know of that successfully had widespread use of StarGraft was Sicle-Craft, but I could be mistaken. I assisted in making tilesets for another mod, but I don't remember the name for it. I also had a side StarCraft expansion that was much smaller in scope called Forgotten Battles. It was going to add one unit for each side and be nice and simple, but that ended at the same time AR did. There was a Map pack that was sold by some company (which ultimately got sued by Blizzard) that needed to be ported to Macintosh. I did that for free, but it was never released for Mac by them. I also did some goofing around and map making with Myth II (great game!) by Bungie and a little with the original Halflife. I really love making expansions/mods for games, however I just don't have the time any longer.
Aaron: Is there anything you want to say? (Like a "set the record straight" type of statement)
Xenophanes: Some people claimed that AR was impossible. There were many "nay-sayers" out there. Generally, I think people were just frustrated because they wanted another expansion and it was taking quite a while. Doing what we were doing was not only possible, but we were very close. When I moved to graduate school I was in the final phase of compiling custom MPQ files with our data. All that remained was to straighten out the StarGraft issues (Sicle from Sicle-Craft was helping me out at the time). AR not only was possible, but it is still doable now. It is just that few people have the skills to bring all of the graphical, data editing, compiling, and tweaking together to pull it off. We had a good crew, but life got in the way. Maybe if that was my full time job and was paid for it there would be a different story.
Well, there you have it. From the man himself, Xenophanes, the story of Aqueous Rift. If you have any questions that I didn't cover here for Xenophanes, feel free to leave them as comments and I will try to cover them in a future interview.
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