June 2002
- 30 -
I think I found a secret
It turns out that you actually
may be able to explore the Brotherhood of the Eternal Word monastery and
several other places in Surdana before you get Arokh. Normally you're
not supposed to be able to access the part of the level beyond the city,
magic shop, and Inquisitor's Lair, but I found a way to get to the rest
of the level. It involves a bit of death-defying sliding and jumping.
To get to the path that leads to the monastery, go up on the path that
leads to the magic shop, and go up to the next-to-last incline, which borders
a body of water below. If you look down, you'll see where the water
ends and the land begins. It's too far to jump to the land, but there's
a trick you can do to get there unharmed. Position yourself right
above where the land begins and slide down the mountain while repeatedly
hitting the jump button. If you got the position right, you should
come to a slope near the bottom of the mountain that you can jump from.
You'll take no damage if you jump from a slope like this, even if you've
previously slid down a slope so steep that it should kill you. Now
you can explore most of the Surdana area.
The chicken weapon is still in
my inventory, as are the other obligatory 1-skill-point melee weapons:
the Tick and Bitter Touch swords and the Earth Blade. I always end
up having those three weapons with me. The Bitter Touch sword can
freeze enemies and it's just really cool looking, the Tick can drain enemies'
health, and the Earth Blade is powerful and is of course one of the four
swords I need to have in my inventory so I can buy the Mournbringer from
Brekk the blacksmith at the end of the game. I'm also getting rid
of all my red health potions and half manas because I already have the
Rejuvenate spell and it's better to use life potions during battles, and
half manas just take up inventory space. I think I'll try to use
up the Bitter Touch sword early on so I can get rid of it and really feel
I got some use out of it, and save inventory space for other stuff.
I'm playing Drakan 2 again, this
time as a pure mage. It's much more expensive to be a mage than I
remember, because magic really costs a lot and you have to buy so much
of it. It's not like when you're a fighter or an archer, because
you can just find weapons lying around all over the place if you know where
to look. You have to buy all your magic, except for the first lightning
spell which you get from a quest. It's a good thing I have a way
to get a bit more money than usual, because as a mage I can carry around
a lot more extra equipment and sell most of it because there's no way I'll
be able to use it. Anyway, I finally got the elusive chicken weapon
today out of pure luck and because I was going to shops so much.
I was in Jade's magic shop and I was buying some 2-skill-point magic spells
when I saw something unusual in the list. It was the chicken!
This weapon does 30 damage and it's armor piercing, like the Mournbringer,
but it's slow and has short range and low durability. Still, it's
a good weapon at the beginning, especially for fighting bosses. I
took down the Inquisitor in five hits with the chicken.
Well, I finally got all the way
through the game with my melee skill at 8, and even though I got the Mournbringer
sword, I didn't actually use it! I didn't get any special Unused
Mournbringer award at the end of the game, so I guess it doesn't matter
whether you use it or not. A funny thing happened to me at the end
of the game. I was fighting the golems in the Flesh Mage's palace,
and they suddenly started freezing up in the middle of their animations.
This made them much harder to fight because I was fighting them in melee
and I couldn't tell if they were attacking or not, so it was harder to
roll out of the way in time. Then the game started freezing up every
few seconds, so I restarted the system and things worked fine again.
Maybe the game has a memory leak or something. I thought only PC
games had problems like that.
I'm playing Drakan 2 again.
First I played as a combination fighter and mage, then I was an archer,
and now I'm building up my melee weapon skills so I can use some of those
higher-level weapons. So far I don't know if it's worth it to get
all the way up to level 8 in melee, because all I get is the ability to
use a few powerful hammer weapons. I've always wanted to see what
it's like to use Maulgak's hammer, so I guess I'll raise my melee skills
up to 8. I wish there were a way to start from the beginning with
all the skills you built up in a previous run through the game, like Chrono
Trigger's New Game + feature.
There's not much going on right
now. Most of the sites I read are on break, or they switched over
to subscription a while ago and I don't really care about subscribing to
any websites. I've been playing Unreal Tournament and trying out
the Chaos UT mod, but it just seems to be another weapon mod like Unreal4Ever.
It looks like U4E-Fortress is ready to download, so maybe I'll try it out
tomorrow.
We've been getting too much rain
here in Minnesota. There were flood warnings on most of the TV channels,
and I think there was one town by a river that actually got flooded.
I hope a flood doesn't hit here, and I hope tomorrow is sunny and dry.
I downloaded the 193 MB demo (on a 56K modem, which took about 12 hours!)
of a new game called Zanzarah, which I read about on Evil Avatar.
It's sort of like a Pokemon game, where you capture and level up creatures,
but the battles are played out in a first-person shooter type mode where
you send out a creature to run and jump around an arena and charge up attacks
to hit an opponent. I only played it for about 30 minutes so I can't
really judge it yet, but so far it seems kind of interesting.
Well, I finally decided to ditch
my old Radeon 32 MB DDR, which was having a few graphical glitches in Drakan
and some problems in Morrowind, and get a Geforce Ti4200. It's the
64 MB version, which I've read is actually faster than the 128 MB because
it has a faster clock speed and better architecture. It supports
pixel shading in Morrowind, which looks really good, and it was only half
the price of the Ti4600. Some of the outdoor town scenes in Morrowind
are still kind of choppy, but they're much better than the frame rates
I got with the Radeon. I've heard that even the top of the line cards
are getting low frame rates in Morrowind, and one of the reasons I've read
was that it's because it's so CPU intensive, but I just read that on a
message board so I don't know if it's really an accurate assessment.
I just saw the movie The Sum
of All Fears, and I really liked it. The acting and special effects
were good, and the dramatic tension was really well done. I've heard
that the movie is really different from the book, but I haven't read the
book. Maybe I should.
By now, I've seen previews of
Douglas442's new level that uses a lot of cool new models, including orc
costumes, so it seems that head attachment objects can work well.
I've already used the head attachment object feature to put the plants
on top of the Siandamanid creatures, and that was after hacking it a bit
to specify the top of the bug as the head, so head attachments on the actual
head will probably be easier to deal with. I plan on making most
of the level 4 orcs wear helms, but their heads are kind of at a weird
position, all hunched over, and they don't really have necks, so I'll have
to fool around with the helm's shape until it's positioned right and doesn't
warp through the orc in any of its animations. If all else fails,
I could just make it look like a big metal version of one of those collars
you put on dogs to keep them from chewing on their stitches after they've
been operated on, because that kind of shape might work with the orc heads
and have the fewest problems.
I'm too much of a perfectionist
to just go to the 24th and start from there, so I'm doing these entries
between now and the 18th. Let's see, the 20th was Thursday, so I
didn't really do much then. I did finally get around to finishing
the Unreal mission pack. To be honest, my main purpose for getting
the mission pack was to get the music, but the game was pretty good.
It was really no different from the original Unreal style of gameplay,
but I didn't expect anything more from it.
Now I've done it. It's
not only the past from last year that's still haunting me, it's the past
from a few days ago, meaning the day I'm writing this entry for, because
it's really the 24th and I have to write a bunch of stuff to catch up.
I've been playing a little Morrowind, a little Drakan 2, a little Unreal,
and other stuff.
It seems like only a while ago
that I made the Drakan multiplayer level Auropolis, which unfortunately
didn't work out. But the failure of Auropolis was not one of my major
concerns at the time. How long have I been working on Drakan levels?
I feel as if it had to be a different person working on Azenera in 2000
from the one working on it in 2001, and even that person is still different
from my current self. If I had finished Azenera back in 2000, I never
would have thought of one of the major enemies in the level series, who
spends levels 6 through 11 trying to kill you and a few other characters.
I never would have come up with a few of the names I have in mind now.
The Sorilian storyline would still exist, and Seerlik would be a much more
powerful enemy who you fight for the last time in the final level instead
of level 6. I wonder how much I will change over the next few years,
and with me, my plans for future Azenera levels? It might just become
something I would never predict now.
As the past is coming back to
haunt me, let us remember my old Sine Wave updates as part of that past.
You may remember that I had in mind a group of mages called the Sorilians
planned for Azenera. They were originally going to be a group of
Kavoh who used close-range magic attacks instead of projectiles, and I
was going to make it so that they were sort of outcasts in Kavoh society,
but I just couldn't make up a plot that anyone could relate to in real
life because magic spell range seems like such a trivial issue. I
know many issues in real life would actually seem trivial to observers
from other cultures or aliens from other worlds (if they exist and are
watching us, which they're probably not), but that's why stories about
our hot topics probably aren't interesting to them. Anyway, Azenera
is supposed to be about a world in danger of being destroyed or conquered
by a bunch of evil forces, so I'll focus on that part of the story and
maybe just briefly go into the internal politics and quarreling of all
the various cities.
I've just read a hint that you
can get some use out of all the redundant Daedric weapons and armor you
can get from Golden Saints and Dremoras. As you may know, enchanting
at a store costs a lot of money, especially if you're making Constant Effect
items. But if you open up the barter screen with someone who both
barters weapons and enchants items, and then enchant something, then they'll
get your gold and have it available for bartering. That means you
can take a bunch of Daedric weapons to a weapon merchant who also enchants
stuff, spend all your gold on enchanting, and then get your gold back by
selling the Daedric weapons. I just read it on a message board (one
of the rare interesting topics) and I haven't tried it yet, so I don't
really know how well it works.
Now that I've built up a powerful
character, it's time to see about this main quest. I've completed
the Dwemer puzzle cube quest, and I know about the bug that keeps you from
getting the key to the rest of Arkngthand, but my security level is high
enough so I can just use lockpicks and probes to get through doors.
I've been distracted lately, because I also just got some new Unreal stuff
including the mission pack, which I haven't played before. I'm kind
of a fan of the Unreal music, and some of the mission pack music is really
good.
You know, I've just about given
up on Morrowind message boards because it seems like people aren't sharing
much useful information, nobody can spell, and some people just want to
bash the game and its fans instead of talking about it. Where are
the topics comparing Morrowind's story to real life historical events,
discussing how to make towns in role-playing games more lifelike, and things
like that? I know there have been a few good topics on help with
quests, finding secret items, and reports on known bugs and ways to make
the game better, but they seem to get buried in a sea of junk. Even
though Drakan was never really a popular game, its message boards were
always full of more thoughtful topics. Well, they're not so much
now, but the ActionXtreme boards were pretty good. If Drakan had
been more popular, then there would be more people who heard of its popularity,
bought the game, and found out they hated it, so there would have been
more people bashing the game on message boards, leading to fans of the
game defending it and insulting the bashers, leading to big flame wars
all over the place. If I end up making games, I hope none of them
are ever popular.
I just got Azura's Star and the
Daedric Crescent! Azura's Star is really cool because it's a reusable
soul gem, so I won't have to carry around a bunch of soul gems if I'm just
going to make minor enchanted items that won't fail when I try to make
them myself. The crescent is a cool weapon too, but it's heavier
than the glass halberd I usually carry around and sometimes the paralysis
effect fails on reflecting enemies and ends up paralyzing me, so I'll stick
with the halberd for now. Yeah, I know, I'm weird for taking the
low-durability spear over the cool unique weapon.
I'm still having fun with the
console AI commands. Now I'm experimenting with the AIFollow command,
which is normally used when you're leading someone to a particular place.
It works on creatures and enemies as well as humanoids, so that means I
can build up an army of cliff racers to run around the world with me and
fight! That takes a lot of work, though, because I have to select
each individual cliff racer, set its fight rating to 0, stop its combat
with me, and set it up to follow me around. It might be better to
have something like a Dremora Lord following me, but it seems like cliff
racers are the only creatures fast enough to keep up with me when I'm storming
across the landscape. Maybe there's a console command that can increase
a creature's speed, because it would be cool to have a really fast netch
army. "Here comes the Netchmaster!" people would say to me, but only
if I changed that to their default greeting in the editor.
Well, I found out that you can
enter scripting commands in the Morrowind console and get control of specific
characters. You can specify a character and call functions to start
combat, change disposition, and many other things. Right now I'm
having a bit of fun with the startCombat function. I went to Seyda
Neen and entered the command Eldafire->startCombat Fargoth, and the character
named Eldafire ran up to another character named Fargoth and started punching
him, so he started to fight back. It was a hand-to-hand duel and
it started to take too long, so I didn't stick around to see who won.
Instead, I went into the tradehouse and started a fight between a bunch
of people in there. Of course, I saved before I started all these
crazy experiments, and I don't plan to use any console manipulation when
I'm really playing. Actually, maybe I'll have to, because I kind
of upset Sul-Matuul over in the Urshilaku Camp when I went there before
I was supposed to, and he kind of tries to kill me whenever I go into his
tent, and I just found out that he's kind of an important character for
a large portion of the game, so I might set his fight rating back down
to 30 or so and mod his disposition up to 75.
I've been kind of bad about updating
this site on time. Sorry about that. I'll have some good updates
ready soon.
The reason the name Salix might
not be suited to me right now is because it's a scientific term used in
taxonomy, and when I chose it, I was in the School of Environmental Studies
and I thought I would end up doing something with the biological sciences.
But now that I'm in college, even though I'm still going for the environmental
studies certificate and taking science classes to fulfill my breadth requirements,
I've decided to major in computer science, so I just thought that a name
more computer-related would be more fitting than a taxonomical one.
But I'm still not sure.
Well, I finally got a complete
suit of glass armor in Morrowind, and I didn't even have to commit any
crimes to get it! First, I found someone in Ghostgate who sells glass
armor, but it's really expensive and I didn't have enough gold. I
went to Bal Fell, which is in the islands east of Vivec, and I defeated
a few Golden Saints and Dremoras and took a bunch of Daedric stuff.
Then I went back to Ghostgate and traded it for the armor. I still
didn't have any glass greaves, so I did some searching and discovered that
there were some glass greaves just lying around inside the Urshilaku burial
grounds, which are on the north side of Vvardenfell. I went in, got
the greaves, and warped back to Ghostgate where I had set a mark, and my
suit of armor was complete! In Morrowind, glass armor is the best
light armor in the game, and I think it looks kind of cool. That's
the main reason I went after it. I guess I could have just stolen
the helm and killed some of the people in Ghostgate who were wearing glass
armor so I could take it, but then I would have felt all dirty and mean.
You know, maybe I'm not so attached
to the name Salix after all... I mean, you hear about people who have had
the same screen name since they started posting on message boards and whatnot,
but I really can't say that about myself because first I used my real name,
then I was Zeoc, then Salix, and now I'm feeling that Salix has kind of
fallen out of the realm of suitable names for me recently. Maybe
I should just make up another name that doesn't really mean anything.
That's the kind of name Zeoc was. I'll wait and see what happens
in the future before I decide whether to change names, but it won't be
for a while, so I'll keep on being Salix for now.
I like Morrowind, it's really
fun. The Drakan community is fading away. I promise I'll finish
Azenera. Insert a really boring, esoteric rant about nothing here.
Sorry I haven't been updating lately. I've become addicted to crackers
and hummus. Also, Morrowind. Man, that Drakan community just
isn't what it used to be. I put a few trees in Azenera but they didn't
look right so I took them out again. Isn't bigotry, like, a really
bad thing? I sure think so. I saw Star Wars: Episode 2, and
I liked it but the dialogue was kind of corny. Opinions of people
on the Internet are varied. I guess it's typical for opinions to
be varied. Even opinions on Morrowind are varied. Did I mention
I like Morrowind? Well, a few people don't like it as much.
Even though it's not exactly bigotry to not like Morrowind, bigotry is
still bad, don't you think? I think so. I also think I should
be working harder on Azenera. Sorry for the sparse updates.
More Morrowind today. I've
really been getting into that game, enough to actually read a few of the
books and learn more about the Elder Scrolls world and its history.
But lately, when it comes down to more time with Morrowind or more time
with Drakan, Morrowind always seems to win because the Drakan world kind
of seems empty and I'm having to fill in a lot of stuff in my mind before
I can make a plot that works. Most of the feeling of emptiness comes
from the dwindling Drakan community, and I find that I'm actually more
tempted to talk about Morrowind in those forums than anything related to
Drakan. Don't worry, I really will finish Azenera someday because
I believe in myself and my abilities, trite as that may sound.
Hmmm... I've been thinking about
not being Salix anymore. If there were a time to change names, it
would be now, I guess... but maybe I won't really change my name because
I actually chose it back in 1999, a few months after I picked the name
Zeoc at random, and it was one of many names I picked before I finally
settled on Salix as something like a final choice back in the middle of
2000, so no... I don't think I'm the one who's going to change anything.
Lately I've been playing Morrowind,
not as much as I could be, but enough to really get into the world and
see what's in it. I've mostly just been running around the world
exploring and finding treasure, but I've gotten to the part of the main
story where you join the Blades and get a quest to talk to someone from
the Fighters' Guild. I don't know where the main quest is going to
go, but I hope I can keep track of it along with all the other quests I'm
sure to accept. To tell you the truth, I've kind of been cheating
a little, because I want to get as powerful as everyone says you can get,
but I don't have the patience for powergaming. I made a mod that
lets you walk 1.5 times as fast, as well as all the other humanoid characters,
and another one that lets you gain skills 10 times as quickly. That
means I can level up and master skills much more quickly, but I still have
to do all the skills enough times before I can master them so the challenge
isn't completely lost.
I'm starting to see that there's
little life left in Drakan. Or, more specifically, little life in
the Drakan community, if you can call it that. Nobody's working on
levels anymore except me, from what I can tell, and the main multiplayer
server isn't even working correctly. That doesn't really make much
difference, because there are never very many servers running. Even
I didn't run a server during college, because it would always crash or
my computer would freeze so it was never reliable, and nobody wanted to
play the new levels I wanted to run.
Well, apparently people like
me so much that they want to send random stuff to me. Check out this
four-line e-mail message I got:
Sigh... lousy 150 KB e-mail worms, making my mail downloads on this 56K modem longer than they have to be. I hope the mail program I'm using isn't spreading these things around...