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Our computers are stone-age. It’s true, and it sucks.

When we moved to Indiana, all our computers somehow managed to die on the trip. I don’t know if it was vibrations, static in the air, change in temperature, or the shock of them not being turned off for years then suddenly spending two weeks shut off – but the only machine I still have that works is my SGI Indigo2.

So we bought these machines, because we needed PCs. Unfortunately, we bought them at an awkward time – they were the last of the machines that used DDR RAM, the last of the machines using AGP ports for graphics cards, and a bunch of other limiting factors.

We bought graphics cards for them, but over time they died. I managed to pick up a cheap GeForce4 TI on eBay – which is a fantastic card for it’s age, but the 512MB RAM in our machines was seriously limiting. I used a modified w1rex config for TF2 to keep the frame rates up – at the expense of it looking terrible. The tiles and textures on the walls and everything just looked plain awful.

So a while back we noticed that DDR RAM was finally at a reasonable rate on newegg, so we picked up a 2×1GB pack. The manuals for our motherboards said that the RAM had to be in matched pairs, but I knew that to be a lie so we each ended up with 1.5GB.

Everything I want to play runs really well, except that the GeForce4TI doesn’t have DX9 support. Which sucks, because I can’t run Windows 7 (which otherwise runs fantastic on this PC) and I can’t run Left4Dead or any of the other newer games.

Who wants to buy me an AGP DX9 graphics card or Christmas? ;D

So I was reading with much interest about Microsoft’s latest alleged mistake, and I was thinking… sure most people are just going to suck it up and forget that they spent $50 on a device that’s now useless, but there are some folks who are genuinely considering jumping ship because of this (not entirely sure why).

I admit I’ve pondered at times how nice it would be to have a 360. When I played the console various times in department stores it just wasn’t exciting like the Playstation 3 was, but it’s pretty clear that XBL has PSN beat hands down. This new update to XB360 could alienate a few people, but I really don’t think after being spoiled on XBL, that PSN is enough to sway people over. I really don’t.

So now’s your chance, Sony. Stop playing years-later-catch-up, and catch-up now. Give PSN users a better experience – for fuck’s sake, XBL users are soon to have Twitter! They’ve had MSN integration for a long time too – as well as voice chat rooms and a bunch of other junk that leaves PSN players going “huh, well at least it’s free”.

And as far as charging publishers for bandwidth on PSN – what a terrible idea. You know the running joke “PS3 has no games”? That move will only make it ten times worse – Xbox360 already has an exclusive on Lost and the Damned, but that idea would simply ensure we never get any DLC ever. Here’s an idea, enforce a monthly bandwidth limit on a per-console basis. Heck, you could even make it scale up with how much money a person spends on the PSN Store for that month.

So I saw a discussion thread earlier today comparing Mumble to the forthcoming TeamSpeak 3. Admittedly at first, I was slightly worried – I’ve invested a lot of time and effort into hosting Mumble, and I have a roadmap in my head for helping it gain a better market share later on… and my kneejerk reaction was to see TS3 (which was initially thought of as vaporware because it’s been “coming” for years now, but apparently the “date” is now set for New Year’s Eve) as a threat to that.

On the whole though, I think it’ll be good. We’ve always done well at niche markets, and if anything the release of TS3 will hopefully “thin the herd” of hosters a little bit.

It’s also an opportunity for fresh ideas for features, so I thought I’d document the few things I’d like to see borrowed:

Friends/Foes: Mumble 1.2 has a friends list, but it doesn’t really do too much yet. I’d like to see it improved upon, but also the “foe” option added which would essentially just auto-mute the person when they’re in the same channel as you. Personally, my wife and I would use this feature on each other – because we game near each other, hearing the other person’s voice twice is quite annoying… so we’ll typically mute each other, but upon a reconnect to the server, it has to be repeated.

URL Logger: Stemming from using it back in the days of mIRC, I don’t really think it needs to be explained why this would be a great addition – and probably not hard to add either. I might even do it myself for my first adventure into QT4 programming!

Spatial Sound: For games that have support for it, Mumble’s 3D positioning trumps TS3’s “Spatial Sound” – but for games that don’t, and for non-gaming purposes, a plugin or a feature in Mumble core that doesn’t connect to any game but instead allows the user to arbitrarily position players where they want would be a great addition.

Other than that, and the possibility of it being a little bit cleaner, I really don’t see TS3 being that huge of a threat to Mumble. Quality is effectively a non-issue when dealing with wide-band codecs, but for absolute sticklers… Mumble’s out in front (CELT allows you to stream music over Mumble at fantastic quality).

I may have to adjust my pricing a little bit to compete with what I’m sure will be an influx of other hosts offering TS3 services… we had planned on offering it ourselves, but I think I’ll stick with the niche instead, and I’ve always had a soft spot for open-source software, particularly if it’s BSD licensed.

I’ve not quite reached the pinnacle of ecommerce fulfillment, but it’s growing steadily. We were for a time making pretty reasonable contributions to Mumble via SourceForge, but we had to upgrade our Dallas Server which ate up most of the profits again so we’re still working our way up.

We’ve been working hard at improving our Mumble 1.2 service which we hope will coincide with the release of 1.2 – if you’re wondering, word on “the street” is 1.2 is anywhere from two months to twelve months away from release, most of it depending on what happens with CELT, an important part of Mumble 1.2.

Every day, more and more bugs are tracked down and squished. Most of the desired functionality is there and works great, there are just a few things that’ll require a lot of thought to ensure they’re implemented correctly.

Now I’ve finally tracked down the issues I was having with Mumble’s overlay feature, I started to play with it some more:

Since I wanted more of a “watermark” than an overlay, I’m using Alpha value of 16 for idle users and an Alpha value of 96 for people who are speaking. In the above image, Tidler and SoulThps are both using the standard text overlay because they haven’t uploaded a user texture. Tidler is transmitting (because his voice activation is broken so he’s transmitting 99% of the time) and SoulThps isn’t.

You can see my name looks a little different however, because I wanted a little extra flair so I created a custom user texture and uploaded it via the client. I then decided it wasn’t fancy enough, so I went trawling Google images for “cartoon cow” and pretty quickly came up with this cute little fella. 30 seconds in Photoshop and I have a new and improved user texture!

On the whole, the overlay is a fantastic feature – you can run fullscreen games and still know exactly what’s going on with your voice chat. Frame rate drops for me are practically non-existent, and my PC is garbage anyway.

Guess what I’ve been doing all day?

If you couldn’t tell by previous entries, I spent way too much of today play LittleBigPlanet again. Most of it I spent unsuccessfully trying to create a roller coaster level – but the physics engine keeps getting the best of me.

There’s just something about those silly little sack people, I can’t get enough of them. In as much the same way a fatness-nut might choke down creatine and fat burner pills, I just can’t put the controller down lately.

I did manage to get a “surfing simulator” level built, but it didn’t really turn out the way I wanted it to. It was kinda clunky, but it worked (I got the physics right) but overall it just wasn’t as fun as I imagined it to be.

Aww well, back to the drawing board.

It’s true, I have an addiction… I love DLC expansion packs!

So why does it seem like I’m always feening for them? I’m sure I’m not alone in that if they were of sufficient quality, I would spend a fortune on them: for example, the MGS4 pack for LittleBigPlanet – despite the fact it was so short, I felt it well worth the money because of the ingenious game device it added (the Paintinator). If that weren’t included I’d want at least twice as many levels for the money, but Media Molecule just aren’t giving me the opportunity to give them more of my money!

So far all they’ve given us is costume after costume – I used to spend money on MapleStory, I’m done spending money on imaginary clothes. Give me something fun to do instead, and I’ll happily spend the money.

It seems the top franchises in the video game realm completely forget about the promises they made about DLC. MediaMolecule made it sound like new level packs would be coming out for all kinds of video game tie-ins, and so far all we’ve had is one. Hire the kid who made the God of War levels to make like 6 really clever tie in levels, perhaps with a velcro-ball-on-a-string to replace the hook thing, and I’d totally freakin’ pay for it (again though, if you’re not going to introduce a new game mechanic, 6 levels is not enough game for $10).

Don’t even get me started on Valve and Left4Dead though. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that Valve release additions to their games for free, long after many people paid for it… but when Left4Dead was being hyped they made it sound like there’d be a continuous stream of new campaigns. We’ve now had two “campaigns” one of which was the lame-sauce survival mode which doesn’t even really count as a campaign.

The saving grace of these two games is that buried under an insurmountable pile of garbage there are some great user-generated levels. But really though, I especially don’t understand the PlayStation titles – they have a huge chance at drawing so much money out of people’s pockets and the thing I’ve spent the most money on is extra songs for Guitar Hero.