Note: This was written two weeks ago and was never published due to a lack of time, many things have changed in the last two weeks for Battlefield Heros. Look for an updated article in a week or so.
Unexpectedly, Friday (March 20th) morning a gift from DICE awaited in one’s email inbox. This gift was a beta key to access the Battlefield Heroes closed beta. After activating the key, since the laptop was already on, one installed Heroes on it. Installation is no slower than games distributed via DVD on a 8mbit/s Internet connection. Surprisingly, the frail Intel GMA X3100 graphics can cope with Battlefield Heroes just fine, though at “low” quality settings. Just about any “standard” 4:3, 16:9, 16:10, and 5:4 resolution are supported, a nice change as all of one’s screens are now 16:10 format.
After playing a good seven or so hours, one has found things about the game that could be improved. The first is the matchmaking only play type. One has never been a fan of such schemes, playing on clan serves is typically more enjoyable. However, as this game is trying to be more casual matchmaking does work well. Since this is a Third Person Shooter (TPS), the camera is always more or less “over the shoulder”. This becomes a problem when up against a wall as the camera gets stuck as it can not go through the wall. Sometimes it will try to go up, which ends up looking at the character’s feet–not good when trying to blast apart enemies. Basically, do not back up to a wall when being attacked as you will most certainly die. Also, tall grasses somehow penetrate the floor pan of the jeeps–just goes to show this is still a beta for a reason.
There is absolutely no team work encouragement. This takes one back to the Halo for PC days when everyone wandered around aimlessly blowing eachother’s brains out while occasionally some one would get lucky and bring the enemy flag to their base. Don’t take this the wrong way, Halo for PC is very fun to play online, it just has nothing that promotes teamwork, something Battlefield has traditionally had. In short, one misses having squads. In Battlefield Heroes it is much easier to do things when working in pairs or groups of three or so, nothing actively encourages or facilitates this behavior.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
Like with Vista, I’m beta testing again. This time, I’m using something a little more powerful, my laptop. Since it came with Vista, some direct comparisons can be done. The first thing to note is Windows 7 Beta 1 is just that, a beta. Though I have yet to have something on it crash, there are some visual bugs that need to be worked out. In certain circumstances I am getting visual corruption in Aero. One thing that was improved right off the bat was wireless networking support. Vista was much better than XP, likewise Windows 7 is much better than Vista in this regard.
Booting does not seem much faster than with Vista, but I am using a slightly slower hard drive, and all my ready boost stuff is disabled at the moment. The sound driver that was installed did not work for the built in speakers on my laptop, but installing a Vista driver for it resolved the issue. Like Vista, the automatic installation of drivers is improved greatly over XP. Unlike Vista, in Windows 7 more information about the devise, and process the installer is following is available. Most devices are just plug-n-play with Windows 7, even more so than with Vista.
The window peaking, and new taskbar are two things I’d throw onto the improvement list. On the taskbar you can move around the currently active applications in a manner that reminds me of Avant Window Navigator (OS X is probably like that too). The mouse gestures will take a little bit to get used to and fully learn, so I won’t comment fully on them at this time.
There are still quite a few problems, but hey, it’s a beta so it’s my job to let Microsoft know about them. The first issues is FTP support, it sucks. Vista FTP support wasn’t much better than XP, they both have issues if you double click on an file (they both try to open the files in Internet Explorer). In Windows 7 Beta 1 I can not even log into my FTP folder, all authenticated FTP accesses fail with the error “The handle is invalid.”
Printer drivers for older USB devices do not exist. My HP Officejet v40 (which is built better than most new printers) had drivers built in to Windows since XP. In Vista the included drivers were slow and made printing painfull, in Windows 7 the drivers are not there. HP does not even distribute Vista drivers for the Officejet v40, so unless you have Vista and rip the drivers out of it, or are resourceful with Google, you are SOL.
There are some screen corruption issues, where Aero flakes out, or the font does not render properly. The font issue is reproducible, go add a printer, and scroll quickly through the driver listing (not using the scroll wheel but instead the scroll bar). It is a flaw in the rendering of the letter ‘e’, and specifically the horizontal line is too thick (two to three times the thickness it should be). The fact that a screen capture using the Print Screen button captures this points to a rendering issue caused by windows rather than a driver issue. Using the ClearType configuration utility (a quick, six step, which text chunk looks best ‘test’ ) seems to resolve this issue.
The Aero corruption issue may be a graphics driver issue. So far I have not found a method that reliably reproduces the issue. It will some times affect the taskbar, when opening and closing windows, or minimizing and maximizing them. Sometimes it will affect the titlebar of an application.
Overall Windows 7 is shaping up to be a good replacement for Vista and XP. Sure the Beta has some bugs, but then again it’s a beta.
-John Havlik
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- Windows Performance Rating
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- New Wireless Network Manager
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- Improper Font Rendering
The only game one received this Christmas was Crysis Warhead. This covers Sgt. Skyes’ (Psycho) journey during the events of Crysis. Like Crysis, the graphics are amazing, even in super low settings. However, you never do interact with Nomad, as in Crysis, which is a letdown. The expansion, if you could call it that (Crysis Warhead does not require Crysis to be installed or even a CD key for Crysis), is more polished than Crysis.
Ammo is automatically picked up, previously it had to be manually grabbed. Ammo is abundant, in Normal difficulty one never found oneself out of ammo while trying to fend off enemies. Unlike Crysis, when you encounter the aliens you have an effective weapon to fight them (the Gauss Rifle). In Crysis you had a shotgun or FY71 (possibly a SMG or Scar but usually there is not enough Scar ammo around and the SMG is less effective than the shotgun and FY71) which are not nearly as effective. New weapons and vehicles are nice. The ASV Armored, basically a HUMVEE with heavy armor and usually come equipped with an anti-vehicle machine gun. This easily tears through the normal HUMVEE like vehicles the Koreans have and the transport trucks.
Landmines are an addition that seemed geared more towards multiplayer game play. The Claymore anti-personal and the anti-tank mine were only available in the multiplayer mode of Crysis. In reality, though available, there really are no places effectively to set traps with mines. Sure, playing with the Claymores was fun, but not as fun as simply running down or sniping enemies. Not once in the campaign did one use the anti-tank mines. There simply was not a good area to deploy them. Again, in multiplayer mode the mines are much more useful.
The FGL40, a grenade launcher with a six shooter style magazine, is perfect against groups of Koreans or Aliens, but not effective against tanks or large aliens. The AY69, a “micro machine gun”, is a fully automatic pistol that can be dual-wielded. It is one’s favorite weapon now. It packs a much harder punch than the normal pistols. With 40 rounds in each gun, you can empty 80 rounds into a group of enemies without reloading. For short range fighting, the dual-wielded AY69 is the best weapon choice. Not only is the dual-wielded AY69 effective against Koreans, it also makes short work out of those small pesky aliens as well. Simple rule of thumb, for your side arm, always duel-wield the AY69.
Crysis Warhead is short, on Normal mode, one beat the game in about 8 hours. One did not try to beat the game as fast as possible, nor did one take the “scenic route”. And, by no means is one a “hardcore gamer”. That said, it is very entertaining. Ideally, it could be three times longer if they added in the interactions with Nomad and expanded the story a bit more. Now, if they would only make an “expansion” tracing the actions of Prophet.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
The graphics were awesome (even at low settings), the campaign was fairly quick moving and in a very linear fashion in most cases, but the ending came abruptly. Anyone who after playing the campaign doesn’t think a Crysis 2 is in the works is a little dense. As in halo, the first set of enemies were fun to kill (in this case the North Koreans) as they liked to use provocative language and curse at the player, even if they couldn’t see him. The second set, those pesky aliens (in Halo I do not like the flood that much), were a pain though the gauss gun makes quick work of them (grabbing the smaller ones is equally effective). And a word to the wise, even though I was able to play Crysis on my P4 3.0Ghz, 1.5GiB RAM, Geforce 6600GT computer, I would not recommend doing it on equivalent hardware. Additionally, I would not recommend running on anything less than 1.5GiB of RAM as Crysis was eating a full GiB on my machine. The game itself never crashed once, a first for me with a sub minimum spec computer.
Multiplayer looks cool, but I’m not going to even try until I get some new hardware. Until then, 2142 and CoD4 will have to do.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
Eye candy; two words that accurately describe Vista. My main gripes with Vista are the layering and hiding of many features that previous Windows versions have. The most obvious to the new user has to be changing the background/display settings. When right clicking on the background there no longer resides a ‘properties’ option, but instead a window for themes/visual settings exists. The old properties menu has been butchered to only show the first two tabs, with settings having its own window. After getting over these setbacks of ‘hidden’ options, I really like Windows Vista.
The lack of anti-aliasing support for the windows + tab replacement for alt + tab, and in the new photo management application is very annoying. Speaking of the photo manager, I’d say it’s almost as good, if not better than iPhoto, and is multitudes better than Pisca. Web 2.0 inspired tag organization along with other methods makes organizing photos a snap. One photo belongs in three tag categories? that’s fine and supported. This is particularly useful for creating slide shows for special events with pictures from different categories. In the slide shows that have about 10 different themes that can be chosen from so far, the edges of some photos, when using a theme that lays the photo down at an angle causes sever aliasing along the edges. This better be fixed by the final release.
Other minor gripes are about Foobar2000 not being able to play files, it is shut down because of an access violation. Songbird also fails to load due to missing DLLs. I guess I expected a heavily optimized application such as Foobar2000 to not load at all. Running in compatibility modes didn’t resolve the problems with these audio applications.
As a linux user, I see many ideas from linux desktops migrated into Vista. What comes to mind is the ‘protected’ administrator mode, and new user folders. Even as an administrator in Vista, programs don’t automatically run in administrator mode. Just as in linux with root users, Microsoft is migrating away from everyday users being able to do everything to their system. While this is a good idea, I constantly find myself needing to run applications as root in Gentoo to do the things I need to do, but that’s because I am typically doing server administration. Now in linux every user has their own folder and their desktop is somewhere within this folder, the same sort of thing has been in windows for a while. What is different is the new focus on the user folder being the main folder for the user, with the documents folder for documents, not downloads, which now have their own folder on default. The entire ‘My’ thing is gone from Vista, instead of My Documents, or My Music there is just Documents and Music folders located in the user’s folder.
Other perks of Vista include automatic support of all plays of sure devices, without having to install drivers or anything. I plugged my Zen Micro in and was ready to transfer music, it just worked. The search for drivers on the internet feature on XP that usually doesn’t find what you need now works with Vista. Originally the driver for the onboard sound wasn’t found, within seconds of going though the install driver wizard my sound chip was recognized and working, without me going to a single website to download drivers, which I had to do for XP. The new searching is nice too. There is no run program anymore, search takes the run program’s functions now.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
WordCamp NYC
