Star Fleet 2010

For those who know me I’ve been playing Eve for a LONG time, I go away at times.. and come back.. why because it’s the only game like it out there.. and yet CCP can’t seem to get anything right of late.

Incarna was the promised Ambulation, walking in station.. having a human body at last.. something promised since 2006ish.. and it comes out half finished and people scream.. and now guess what? that’s right.. incarna’s been axed.. goodbye.

This SUCKS. -3 subs to CCP.

That’s right, Obsidian have lost my patronage and my money.. why? Because they took what should and could have been a great game and fucked it worse then they fucked even Neverwinter Nights up at the start.

I could forgive them for the complete change in game style with Dungeon Siege.. i could forgive them for the clunky clicking controls that feel like they where ported directly from a console.. which they where.. What I can’t forgive them for .. is the mess they made of the Multiplayer.

First off I do NOT want to have to be bound to some one else’s screen.. sorry this = SUCKFUL, it works on consoles, it DOES NOT work on PC games.. especially not Dungeon Hack and Slash

Secondly.. why the FUCK am I getting lag on a LAN game??

And lastly Why the FUCK am I bound on that multiplayer Camera again..

Everything I’ve read from Obsidian on it they try and say it was for the ‘hotswapping’ playing.. yeah that’s fine you dickheads, if your on a console!!!! Dungeon Siege was NEVER a CONSOLE game, christ.. and the lack of ability to move beyond where the other players are is KILLING me, literally.. I almost smashed my computer today while trying to play Co-Op with my Fiance.. why? Because i can’t back off from her to use my ranged abilities or get close when she’s backing off to use my melee abilities.. yeap we’re screwed.

So fuck it Obsidian you’ve lost a customer.. for good.

Just a heads up I’ve posted new art work up at my Deviant Art page, Starfleet.deviantart.com

Warning the following is not all roses and it is the authors personal view if you have a problem with it tough luck by being at this site you agree to the legal conditions over to the side.

As some may know I use Profantasy’s Campaign Cartographer 3 a fair bit and I must say that over all it’s a generally great program, CC3 as we call it has seen a wealth of new features added that make it amazingly better then it’s last major 2.x version, the bitmap graphics abilities for one, the addition of lovely styles for another over all it’s a good program however judging by my title and how i generally post yeah you are right I have a ‘beef’ with the program.

First off Lets just List out those Good points in Dot Format.

• Amazing Bitmap Tile Library
• Great Tools
• Amazing Add Ons
• Powerful for making both bitmap and vector based maps of any format.
• Ahead of the competition in most respects

Ok got that, now some of the bad

• Clunky backwards out of date User Interface
• User Interface that Ignores the ‘standards’ of every other drawing application and even most modern cad programs
• Built on the backbone of a FastCad version that is no longer supported.
• Regularly has little issues that profantasy promise to fix that then take forever to get fixed (see the ugly section that is coming up).

Now don’t get me wrong again here I’m willing to ignore 99% of that ‘bad’ list, I love Campaign Cartographer it lets me make great maps.. or well did does most of hte time.. you see that is where we hit the ‘ugly’ section here, and Campaign Cartographer has a few ‘Uglies’ that really stand out to you if you’ve been using the program for a while and you know the worst part, Profantasy knows about them and yet hasn’t really done anything about them except say that they are ‘limited’ in what they can do due to ‘the underlying cad engine’..

So what are those uglys?

Well for a start CC3 is based on Fastcad32 that’s right the 32 Version of fastcad, what’s wrong with that? well it’s actually based on 6.2 of Fastcad which you can’t ‘even upgrade yourself to fix the problems found.. Add to that the fact that it tends to not like windows updates (though profantasy has gone a long way to redressing this) and it starts to get even more fun.. Then there is the fact that it’s a 32 Bit program in a 64 bit world.. and we see no rush to update it to allow it to use that extra memory… and to add to those problems.. Whow to ye if you should attempt to export a Graphically ‘intense’ image that is over 7000x7000pixels in size. At this point you may or may NOT end up with that lovely windows 7 window popping up telling you that FCW32.exe has stopped responding… and it’s not just exporting that this can happen on, but printing and anything else that requires the vaulted Fastcad engine to ‘render’ the entire image you have been workign on.

But this is not the worst of it,  no should you manage to get this lovely image to actually render your likely to have to spend the next hour fixing it in a 3rd party program! And this is the one that really irks me off the most, you see Campaign Cartographer 3 renders out with what those in the industry would call ‘graphical artifacts’ and no these are not the same as holy relics .. they are to put it bluntly graphical data that should not be there in any shape or form.. how does CC3 do it? Well it tends to add extra ‘lines’ into your image at approxamently every 400 pixels on the Y axis of your image.. (the Heigh Axis’s for those of you who need it explained).. so you end up with things like this

See all those ugly little jagged changes in the lines.. horrible right? And yeah extra data that shouldn’t be there..

That’s fine you might say let profantasy know they’ll fix it after all Campaign Cartographer is ‘professional’ software, costing 45 pounds for the base program then 40 pounds for every expansion/add-on (And that’s cheaper then it was when I brought it) not to mention the yearly annual subscriptions right?

Wrong.

Profantasy has known about this ‘bug’ for over a year, actually it’s pushing 2 years for this bug and we where told it would be fixed however it has not been, instead now we get ‘work arounds’ which include using a 3rd party program and ‘moving’ the image to fix it pixel by pixel.. and the excuse given for why the bug hasn’t been fixed and i will quote the actual email that i recieved.

Believe me, we would like to fix this bug as much as you.
I’m doing maps professionally too after all. But owing to the nature of CC3
with its underlying CAD engine and many externally programmed parts, there are
certain limitations on what we CAN do to fix things like that. Something being
high on our priority list unfortunately doesn’t mean that we can fix it when we
want to.

I can only say that we’ll continue to look for a solution
for this export problem. I’ll let you know specifically, when we find a way
around it in CC3 itself.

This is all well and good but if they can’t do anything about it then how did they write in their brand new ‘anti-aliasing’ addon.. oh that’s right they just really double the image then process it outside of CC3 down by 1/2 causing more crashes.

For professional level software the above artifacts and the above reasoning is a joke. You have to remember Profantasy plugs their software at every major gaming convention, I wonder are they showing the fact that this bug exists 2 years in?

And Now i know I’m not going to be making friends with Ralf or Simon over at Profantasy by posting this but 2 years of ‘waiting’ for a primary bug to be fixed is a joke and makes one really consider going to use Nbos’s slightly less robust but at least readily patched and updated.. FM software, especailly given that Ed the developer over there is ready to listen to his users and do his best to update his own program coded from scratch to do what they require it to do.

-Rob

I’m happy to say that at times people will be able to watch me working from now on.. I won’t promise to always have the livestream going but I do hope to at least be broadcasting from time to time, letting people see me work on art as I’m actually doing it rather then just the end product.

If you don’t know what Livestream is, it is literally a live stream of my desktop + any other video i wish to share, in most cases when it comes to my computer the live stream would be of my graphics tablet.