Linear level design

Was reading through Andrew's lament about levels and literally laughed out loud at one of the comics used as an anecdote of level restrictions

GameLog 47

Battle of Tiles (17h) - Got back into BoT while I was sick. It was an easy way to pass the time while the HDD had a long overdue defrag.

Modified the strategy somewhat this time with the pick of the elite archers frontlining the show to get as high as possible. I didn't pick up anything apart from Priests (6), Thunder Wizards (4), and a boatload of slimes if they had 250+ health. The slimes made a corridor themselves below the main archer s that if needed they can push up through to sacrifice themselves when I need to retreat. This is mainly for boss time, but it's convenient enough to just leave them there in that formation for the whole trip.

Spent aaages levelling up both mages and priests to level 50. Priests are easiest by simply backing up any melee unit that goes up against an archer. The archer stays in place happily plinking away into your meatbag while you level up your heals. Hardest thing is choosing a decent archer with damage close to maximum healing strength so that it doesn't take forever. Wizards need a squishy isolated priest to pound on for their levelling pleasure. Just need to check that the thunder defence is low enough to damage them, but not enough damage that they can't heal themselves in one turn. Takes far longer than the priests though as the damage is usually pretty small. I'm still not sure what dictates whether you get area effect or 3 range as your additional skill. At first I thought it was getting longer range if you levelled up to 50 with a 2 range attack, but that proved incorrect later on. Although the area effect healers are great, I had 5 of the suckers and I would have dearly liked another ranged one to reach the front man.

Through all the levelling I took a couple of notes in my spreadsheet about how they progressed. It looks like at each level they gain the same amount of attributes with only slight variation between different tiles of the same type. The change is nothing like the initial stat spread (~20%), so i'm still going to spend most of my efforts optimising the choice of tile based on initial stats.

The money savings were to be ploughed into a golem on the 4th level at 200,000 a pop, but with ~6400 HP it is double the elite archer at level 150. no defence is also a good thing for extra XP from healing.

Finally lost all this great buildup by accidentally closing the game with the windows close button rather than saving it. Restarted it again to find it had wiped the save. Aaaaargh!!!


Football Manager 08 (7h) - Gateshead Season 3 finished 10th - After a brief hiatus I went back in to finish off the season, only to find I had just 2 games to go. We draw the first and keep 14th place, then win the last against 12th placed Aldershot to finish 10th. Moderately happy with the season, but i don't seem to be getting any serious replacements during the off season so it looks like more or less the same team will need to make it to the playoffs next year.

We do the usual home game bonanza for next season's friendlies, getting 5 championship division teams to fleece on each Saturday with more modest Blue Square Premier team to check our progress on Wednesdays. Wigan even wants a friendly at our place after our schedule is packed, but club is flushed with cash at the moment so there's no real need to push it.

Lots of staff turnovers planned for the end of the season, but 2 unexpectedly get bought out from under me. One awesome scout was pretty hard to replace, but Gk, Atk, and Def coaches all roll over to make way for fresh blood.

First friendly in the new season has Birchall break his leg! Now I'm definitely on the hunt for a striker. Maybe Byrne can step up and play as good as his stats suggest.


Guitar hero III (7h) - The PS3 is now living upstairs and it does make it simpler to pop into GH3 for a quick session after brekky & lunch, usually with Cameron in tow for drum support. Managed to go back through easy and 5 star pretty much any song I play. I'm so close to getting a 100% too. Only a matter of time.


Team Fortress 2 (4h) - There's been a couple of new updates coming through, so I hopped on for a bit of 2FORT fun to see if there were any drastic changes. I can still top the pub charts as rocketman, but there must have been a pyro skillup akin to the medic one recently as they now can blow back rockets :/

TMNF (2h) - A little race here and there to keep the stats up

GameLog 46

Testing to see if the GameLog website is a more useful place to store these logs.

Football Manager 08 (15h) - Gateshead, Season 3, 12th BSP - We've won the Setanta Shield in front of 27,000 paying public to boost morale, the coffers and my profile at the club. I'm coming off contract at the end of this year so the bargaining table is open, open enough for them to accept an upgrade to the training facilities. I'm not going anywhere as although we've given up hope of advancing this season, we're set for a solid run next season. I could still finish ~10th as we're all clustered in the middle, but with 5 games to go there's no real need to bust a gut. Roll on July 1st to clean out the deadwood in the squad.


Guitar Hero III (8h) - After moving the PS3 upstairs and with Greig, Matt & Scott still here we hammered GH3. Finally got to play "Cliffs" on Medium and barely made it through. Scott's playing on medium now too, but it's easier to keep it on Easy and swap between everyone.


TrackMania Nations Forever (7h) - My lack of play had dropped my rank out to the 50,000's, but at least I'm getting 200+ points a race now if I finish on the podium. Ended up back down to the 20,000's


Battle of Tiles (5h) - Showed it to Scott and it filled in a Tuesday night while the WoW servers were down. Kept losing men to the level 3 boss, enough to piss me off and restart. Playing back on medium to see how many levels there are.

GameLog 45

Guitar Hero III (10h) - Mat & nat came up for the baptism on Friday night, so we got stuck into GH. Scott and Greig joined in on Saturday to give it a good thrashing. Finally got past "Welcome to the jungle" and ploughed through a couple more sets to be only 1 song shy of "cliffs" on medium.

Spore Creature Creator (6h) - Took an eternity to get, and the full version only offered a couple more options to peak my interest. Cameron enjoyed it sso I'll probably be fiddling with it every now & then.

FM08 (2h) - Gateshead, Season 3, 8th BSP

FuryBand (2h) - VRBones LXXI, Level 18 Mutant Beorning Jedi

Metal Gear Solid 4 (1h) - Hard to find time when Sandy and Cameron aren't using the TV and I'm not interested in something else.

Battle of Tiles (1h) - Demo'd it a bit to others

Visit Spore.com

It's time for some critters!

Even tohugh I picked up the pre-order, the 17th rolls on and there's nothing released. Eventually the trial version is out, but still nothing on the full version.

Mucked around in the trial version last night for about 4 hours creating 4 totally different creatures. I showed Cameron tonight and he liked it enough to keep him occupied, but "TrackMania" was the real reason we went to the PC and eventually it won out.

Seeing no way to update the trial into the full fersion I uninstalled the trial to see if there was anything the EA downloader would do. Now instead of saying 'Play' it says "releasing in 3 hours". Looks like EA are heading the same way as steam with their downloader and are being tarred by the same ineptitude.

GameLog 44

Chaos League (9h) - Picked up a copy for $10 on the Monday to tie me over unitl Metal Gear Solid came out. Takes forever to play using action pauses, but it still has that Bloodbowl feel. Played through a couple of games. Slaughtered some dwarves 13-0.

Metal Gear Solid 4 (8h) - Finished the first act. Might redo to see if I can do it without killing anyone, possibly after going through once though. Tried the multiplayer and I couldn't believe how much stuff I had to go through to get into a game. It took about 1 & 1/2 hours to download patches, create accounts (with one of the most inane requirements on game name I've seen) and then find a server. Others playing must have had a keyboard as they were chatting quite regularly during the game, and there's no way known I'd suffer typing out a message using the controller. Quite frankly it was a really bad experience, much worse than I've seen on PC. If that is supposed to be the friendly console way then let me outta here. The game itself feels epic, and it's been a pretty interesting storyline so far.

Football Manager (6h) - Gateshead, Season 3, 8th BSP - We played poorly to get dumped out of the FA Trophy, but we're up to the 1/4 finals of the Setanta Shield. Playing much better in the league now and sitting in a firm mid-table position with only 8 points shy of playoffs. I had ruled out a serious challenge for the title once I saw how poorly we were going in the first couple of rounds, but we might just jag a couple more and be in with a shot. Cook finally broke an 18 hour goal drought so we now have 3 strikers I'm confident with. Clarke really doesn't have the stats to be playing as well as he does, but he's the crowd favourite and keeps banging them in. Once he gets a goal drought I'll probably permenantly bench him.

Guitar Hero III (4h) - Still can't get past "welcome to the Jungle" on medium. It's still fun playing through the easy tracks though. Only a few left that aren't 5 stars.

Battle of Tiles (3h) - Trying on "very hard" but I keep losing men to the group attacks. Got one save past the first boss, but lost my main lightning mage.

Spore creature creator

Spore is slowly getting closer, and GameSetwatch has a good article about the Maxis crowd and the imminent release of the creature creator next Tuesday. I like the sound of immediately embedding animation into blogs and YouTube vids. Sounds like a perfect launchpad for viral marketing.

GameLog 43

FM08 (4h) - Gateshead, season 3, 15th - Still in the FA trophy and Setanta Shield, but not travelling too well in the league. Uni assignments and the arrival of Rachael made the week fly by!

Battle of Tiles (5h) - Saw this indie game on GameSetWatch. Liked it enough to pick it up for a fiver.

Guitar Hero III (3h) - Andrew's nearly completed medium level. I'd rather rock out on easy ones.

GameLog 42

FM08 (8h) - Gateshead, season 3, 12th - A dozen games in and it's a so-so result so far. Even though the team is ranked well individually the bookies still have us behind most matches, and there are some teams who pay pro's over 2000 pounds a week. Seems like some of the difficulty further up the league is flowing down this way.

Guitar Hero III (5h) - Good for vegging out once home from work.

FuryBand (3h) - VRBones LXII, Level 21 Beorning Jedi Mutant - Talking to Ben made me pull this one out of the closet again. I've been trying to get enough into gauntlet mode to get full identify working. Still haven't made it to lvl 24. Keep dying to silly pack situations.

Cannot remove Mac created directory ending with space

Had a curly one at work today. A Mac user had created a directory stored onto the Windows 2003 fileserver with a space on the END. It first started appearing in the backup error reports stating the file didn't exist. When I finally got round to looking into it I found it was virtually impossible to remove from the server because the API must truncate the name. Couldn't delete through windows explorer, through DOS, through DOS as an 8.3 file, or brute forcing a delete on the whole directory.

Finally hopped onto a linux box and removed it with a simple "rm ._*" over a cifs share ...