Still Around!

First, like usual, let me apologize for a lack of updates.  My spare time has been used towards Star Fleet Battles and Federation and Empire recently, where I've been making various utilities for that system instead of Battletetech.

Anyway, we have some new products!  Woot!  First is Jihad Turning Points Hesperus.  Not a big review needs to be made for this, its another JTP product.  If you like one, you'll like em all.  It contains a new Galahad and Sturmfeur variant.

Next, we have a map pack.  I recommend buying the expensive (hehe) flatlands terrain set at like $5.99, if you want any maps.  They are the maps we are used to, and though they seem to be redone, they also seem identical to the originals from so many years ago.  The hex is an overlay in the PDF so you could probably extract the maps without hexes, which would be pretty neato.

Next, the Record Sheets 3075 Cutting Edge/Age of War.  I screwed up with this one.  I was emailed the update and downloaded the updated version, but never looked at it.  Then they released the 2 new versions and I purchased them as well.  I ended up with basically 2 copies of the same thing, in PDF, so gave one away.  There are 533 record sheets in there, and no, I have not yet updated my database with them yet.  It is on my todo list though, as well as the update to the site which has not been forgotten.

And finally, we have the Historical Liberation of Terra II.  If you liked the first one, you'll like the second.  It has a LOT of text, and I'm sure its a great product, but I just haven't read it yet.  I was very frustrated to not see a list of the divisions and their quality, nor specific units that joined various houses/comstar.  Its possible the latter is in the text though.  Page 114 has a list of strengths, including warships, during the battles that mauled the star league.  Hopefully there will be a SLDF 2765 book that has the detail I wanted.  I'd love to see an actual breakdown by regiment (at least quality/type/name) but at this point it'd be nice to just see the divisional information.

Herb Beas over at CGL hates Texas, according to the latest battlechat, and being Texan yet having lived in NY, CA, GA, and Germany, I can't see why.  Maybe he hates the summers, or has a problem buying a new 2000 square foot home for under $200K, or perhaps the native Texan people who are inexplicably nicer than most folk annoy him, or maybe he loves our great economy and plentiful jobs.  Since he isn't here to defend himself, and I can make wild assumptions, I'll just think he hates the state as he had a traumatic childhood experience with a cow that he can't discuss openly.

Oh, and I logged in this morning and saw the LAM Kickstarter was not only over $25,100, but over $30K.  This means I get the 9 LAMs, PLUS a trio of miniatures for the Wasp *and* stinger.  I hope it gets to at least $35K,  so I can get a trio of Phoenix Hawks too, but with 15 mechs at $255 the price dropped to a more reasonable $17 per miniature.  Not sure why I bought any, I figure the chance of me actually playing BT at a tabletop again are slim to none, but I liked the designs.


I probably won't get back into battletech until my current Federation and Empire game is complete, and that may be a year from now :(  We'll see though.

Battlechat

Well my computer is holding strong.  I've yet to see over 5% CPU utilization on my 32 cores, though my RAM has creeped up to nearly 10GB in use (out of 64GB, so I'm ok!) but I do have a lot open... I'm still very disappointed with 3*SSD's in raid 0 performance, in typical operations is the same, or slower, than my old 5 disk scsi array.

Anyway, onto Battletech stuff!

So they did another battlechat, you can see the transcripts here.  Here is what I got from it:

#1.  These are stupid.
#2.  Many, if not most, of the questions are stupid
#3.  Herb rarely answers questions.  Instead he gives vague and useless answers.
#4.  Record sheet books are now very costly, time wise, as they have no software to do it.... *I* have software, and can even just configure it to print text in spots instead of using a design system at all.  I can print a PDF from an excel worksheet of units in minutes, indexed, with a summary in the end and using unit images.  If they asked me, I could have a warship version done in a day or two.  The mech, fighter, vehicle, and dropship version is already done (see TRO 3063).  Oh well.
#5.  It has been *years*, and IO progress I get the feeling is still pretty much stagnate.  I bet we don't even see it in 2015.
#6.  Poor Wierdo, he just doesn't get enough warship love.

On to what I've been working on.

#1.  About 90% of my spare time has been spent playing, discussing, and working with Federation & Empire and Cyberboard.
#2.  The other 10% has been working on a dice roller (you can view it here).  The random number generator is the best out there, as I get the numbers from random.org instead of relying on a computer.  I'm working on a rewrite of it that'll track turns, more detailed die formats, etc, etc.

I spent a few days in there playing the Diablo 3 campaign.  The movies alone are worth it, and very impressive.  The game, like all blizzard games, doesn't lack in polish.

I haven't entered in the updated vehicle annex, nor the stupid XTRO boondoggles stuff into my database yet.  Heck, in fact I don't think I did a database refresh since the last XTRO came out.  IIRC, I made some change thought it may potentially break stuff, so until I look at the code again and work on the major update there will probably be no more updates.

MWO is still stupid.

I'm not sure I'll get back into BT again until IO comes out, or maybe HBHK so I can finish up my cartographer app.  I think they have some leadership/QA issues over there and its very frustrating on my end.

Hell, I can sum up ONE thing that shows what is the primary thing wrong with the BTU IMO:

Even their errata has errata.... 

New Reviews!

Well I purchased 4 products yesterday.  XTRO Boondoggles, Objects Periphery, Objectives Clan, and the Revised Vehicle Annex.  I was sorely disappointed :(

First, XTRO Boondoggles.  I guess the name is appropriate!  This entire XTRO is full of crap, and by crap I mean you'll never use any of that crap on your table, heck, many of which are labeled as ILLEGAL, so stupid.  The artwork isn't very good either, well, the designs aren't, the art itself is SHUDA which we all know has done some great work.  Anyway, we have mechs with equipment that doesn't work, a Champion and Scorpion LAM (ok, the latter isn't horrible).  The Matar looks cool, obviously a predecessar to the Behemoth on the cover of TRO3057, and the design isn't too bad.  Well, wouldn't be too bad if it was functional.  We have hovercraft with secondary tracked motive systems (a 50 ton condor has 2.5 tons for track, and 2.5 for hover, so basically, tracked movement is no tonnage!).  There is a Neptune with hydrofoils, though it has to pay tonnage for them.  There are a few easy to forget support vehicles, the Banshee fighter from the Somerset Strikers.  They did have an autonomous jumpship scout which was a neat idea, and the "Enterprise" which is a decent warship with a whopping 648 fighters.  Right, the other plays will *kill* you if you bring this to the table.  Of course, it can't move, so its really just a space station and its art sucks ass.  They mention monitors, have a page on them, but no actual stats.

There are 2 new quirks.  One is "nonfunctional" and is negative 5.  So something doesn't work... hmmmm... lets make it life support for -5.  

And then there is illegal.  Seriously, ILLEGAL, as they do not follow the construction system.  Not sure how anybody can ever make a unit designer with crap like this implemented.  May as well just draw it up in excel and do it yourself, as software isn't designed to let you do everything.  Oh, and illegal stuff also fails and breaks all the time, go figure.

So onto the 2 object books.  If you've bought 1, you know what your getting.  Nothing new or innovative.  The clan book is ONLY the inner sphere clans.  If you love these books, add them to your collection, but since they are missing critical info to me like production numbers, they are kinda just fluff only and not very useful.

And onto the Vehicle Annex.  I was under the impression that there were going to be serious updates to the book and format of support vehicles.  Honestly, I can't even notice a difference skimming it.  I presume lots of the errors were fixed, as when I submitted errata long ago I was told they would be.  If you have the money, and love using stuff in this books, go for it, but it is far from a necessary purchase.  Not even any record sheetsh, sheesh.

Sure hope these products weren't great because they are spending all their time making IO great, but I'm not holding my breath!

It's Alive!

Well I couldn't wait, and went and blew money locally to get my machine back up.

I purchased a dual processor AMD Supermicro motherboard, 2 Opteron 2.1 Ghz w/16 cores, 64 GB of ram, and 3 240GB SSD drives, plus a few other minor things.

The fans for the CPUs weren't available locally, so I rush ordered them from newegg (overnight, but it took 4 days, go figure).

So I got my machine up and running.  Sorta....

I installed Server 2012, as we are using it a bit at work, and since 2003 I've been using server as my primary OS at home over Vista/Windows 7/etc.  It installed ok, but everything I did had a lag.  It wasn't my computer's fault, as every machine I've used server 2012 on I've seen a lag in response.  I know Microsoft is trying to get administrators to stop using the GUI and move completely to powershell, but sheesh.  Anyway, after a lot of various issues, but mostly the slowness, I gave up on trying to run it.

So I installed Windows 8, which I've been using for a few months on my work Laptop.  I, like apparently everybody else, think the new metro UI is stupid.  Great for a Tablet/Phone perhaps, but for a workstation its idiotic.  Good news is there are start menu replacement apps out there that pretty much prevent it from popping up.  I also installed Office 2013.

Well first, I tried a few games, nearly all of them crashed to the desktop.  Did some research, turns out the entire gaming industry is looking at Windows 8 as garbage.  So forgetting that for a few, I jumped into Excel, which I use a LOT for various data input.  Its slow as hell.  I type 80wpm, and try to avoid using the mouse as it slows down productivity, but Excel 2013 is so slow as to be unusable for me.  I do some research, find out it isn't just me, and in fact even at calculations its slower.  You would think 32 cores calculations would be instant.  Nope.  Heck, even if its got high requirements that's fine, but a dual processor 32 core system with 64GB of ram running on triple raid 0 SSD should be overkill, not below minimum specs.

So, I gave up on the new MSFT OS's and Office 2013.  They just, well, suck.  This isn't just a quick opinion  of some noob either.  I've got over 20 years of DOS/windows experience and have supported it in some of the largest environments in the world.  I've used 2k3 for quite a few months, and Windows 8/Office 2013 since their CTPs.  However, their new direction isn't the right one, and if you own stock I'd sell it immediately.

So tonight I'll go back to Windows Server 2008 R2, which made a great previous desktop.  I'll pay attention to the news to see when Microsoft acknowledges Windows 8 as Windows ME 2.0, and Office 2013 as, well, an "oopsie", so I can have faith in that company again.  Since Gates left it hasn't done very well and I fear for the future of IT.

As for Battletech, I've done nothing in over a month.  Many of the forum topics, and most of the posts, are downright stupid.  Their only new product is an objectives book for the periphery, which never includes useful stuff like production numbers or all the conventional factories, and I'm not seeing anything new come out over there.  Perhaps they are all focused on the greatness that'll be Interstellar Operations.... sorry, didn't meant to make ya laugh :)

I'll soon get back into the swing of things, and be able to update everything.  Till then sorry for my lack of existence on the net, it'll get better.

Technical Difficulties

First of all I apologize for a lack of updates, I added all the new RS3067 units like 3 weeks ago and still haven't gotten the refresh on the database done yet.  Between the holidays, a car accident, and serious computer issues, my productivity is down to crap.

And speaking of computer issues.  I live on my computer far more than most and my computer is far more valuable to me (monetarily) than most of ya'lls.  My current configuration cost me almost $10K and is about 4 years old now.  It is actually the oldest computer I've owned in 20+ years, typically I buy a new one every year.  My servers are up, and it isn't like I have a dozen other computers in the house, but none are my "primary" with the 4 monitors, all my play files, a good video card, and 12GB of ram (yes, I actually use that).

So anyway, the first week of December my SCSI RAID card decided to throw errors when I rebooted.  I hadn't backed up that drive in about a week, and didn't want to lose my work.  The drives appeared fine, just the controller card that lets the OS see them.  So I scoured ebay and found a replacement, got it ordered, and received it about a week before Christmas.  I was able to get my OS running, got everything backed up, but after about 20 minutes it died again.  I figured I had another bad card (it was used) so ordered an Intel card instead of the old LSI card.  It ended up having the same issue, ugh.  So I swapped slots in my motherboard, disabled the memory on the card, and my computer can run for maybe an hour or two, then it dies again.  By dies I mean the mouse cursor even stops responding, the system locks up completely, and requires me push reset.  So I turn it on to get some files occasionally, but leave it off most of the time.  I think I've troubleshooted everything, and it just appears this motherboard doesn't like SCSI controllers anymore.... or a lot of coincidences are throwing me for a loop.  So I'm just kinda sitting on it until I figure out what to do.

Normally I'd just go buy a new computer, which is about due.  I haven't needed to upgraded as my system still runs everything fast, and processors and drives aren't getting any faster.  I ran Linux for a week to give it a thorough chance at being my new OS, but it sucks horribly, and its my professional opinion that its a poor man's OS, with no advantage at all over windows, unless your dirt poor.  Anyway, I haven't bought a new one as taxes are coming up, plus the "fiscal cliff".  Even if we don't cross over the cliff I expected to have to pay $10K or more this year (tax return, wtf is that?) even after both the wife and I have 0 deductions set... damned IRS, plus the $1000 deductible on my car.  Anyway, I want to get my taxes paid off before I go buy a new big machine, so it may be as late as May before I can get running again.  Probably a lot sooner as I'll just reinstall windows on one of the 10 SATA drives in my computer and I think it'll be ok, it'll just be slower and annoying to me :).

But anyway, just wanted to let readers know why updates have ground to a halt.  They aren't halted, just delayed for a bit.

The Errata in me

So I'm big on details in game universes, one of the reasons I enjoy the BTU so much as its just soooo full of detail.  Anyway, I, like many of you, get a bit frustrated when I purchase a new product and find it filled full of errors.  I'd be ok if it was a PDF, and a new updated PDF got released every month or so with any errata that was discovered.  That is why PDFs are so great.

Anyway, to my point.  I started entering in the 3067 Unabridged stuff into my database and immediately start to see errors (FYI, I'm 27% complete now, but haven't updated the DB yet).  Not huge numbers, but not just a couple either.  I am not sure how they make them.  If they are using MegaMekLab or some other software to create them, the software is probably at fault.  If they are making them by hand, well, they are insane, and that'd be the reason for the errors.

I know CGL internally is frustrated by the lack of good software to make and print units and RS books.  I'm sure they are more frustrated than we are (and by some internal emails I saw a couple years ago, perhaps a LOT more frustrated).  I don't know what Rick Raisley's real world issues are, but they have pretty much killed any new HMP software.  Based on the way he writes them though, and the rate of new items being released from CGL, even if he does eventually get HMP 6 finished, it'll be outdated within a few months.  Heck, and that is only HMP.  What about infantry, battle armor, protomechs, space craft, support vehicles, buildings, etc, etc???  Yeah, dead end IMO.  Solaris Skunk Works is better these days in about every way, and even its pretty limited and slow going.

But all my recent work on TRO3063 really showed just how annoying it can be to create these applications.  There are just soooo many special case rules that have to be looked at.  Mechs are the hardest, as the critical slot diagram can be a real pain, but the other units aren't so bad.

I offered a couple years back to write them a HMP style replacement, for nothing, and my only request was that they can give me timely answers to issues that pop up with designs and missing information.  That is where it all died.  Since then, I've completed my database of equipment in a modular enough format that adding new stuff is a snap, and I even have data for all 5500 units or so that have been created done.  With the work on TRO3063 I've written code to calculate battle values, costs, years of introduction/extinction, and even the tech rating and 3 era availability codes. I can enter a mech, or *any* design possible in the BTU into a single line in excel (as its MUCH easier to update excel than a database), run a little script to update the database with the new unit and/or equipment, and bam, all finished.  The way I wrote the calculations is nearly identical for every unit type, with only very minor differences.  The code is all modular, and highly adaptable for an ever changing game system like Battletech.

So, wanna know why I haven't written software to do this (this being a designer for *everything* in the universe)?
#1.  (75%) No support from CGL.  Even when I posted questions on their "rule questions" forum it'd often take months to get answered, if it ever did.  No way I can write software, hit a roadblock, and wait 6 freaking months for an answer.
#2.  (15%) Nobody has asked me to.
#3.  (10%) I need to feel like what I'm spending my valuable time for is worthwhile to more than just a couple people.  If I dive into a project like this, I need a few dozen folks asking me every day "is it done yet?" to keep me on the project.  I don't like to let people down, but if nobody is counting on me I'll drift off into other projects.

Its getting hot in here!

So I built this whole encyclopedia site this last spring.  I powered on a 2nd server (huge rack mounted things, not just some PC) in the extra room in my house.  All was well, though it probably costs me $50 a month in power to run these suckers.  Anyway, once we stopped using the Air condition (its December now, and though it dropped down to 40 a couple times already, its 80 outside now in Dallas, woot!) that room got *VERY* hot.  Even 2 little servers, barely working, could easily throw that room up to 100 degrees.  Crazy.  So I had to leave the door open, and those things are kinda loud and annoying.  Anyway, a month of that and I was sick of it.

So I got my previous "primary workstation", which was a Dual Xeon 3.6 Ghz with 6GB of ram.  I upgrade the 8 SCSI hard drives to 146GB/15k/U320, and installed Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012 (an upgrade from the 2008 R2 versions).

I had some various things that slowed progress in the middle of all that, but end result?

The entire site, as well as my internal network, is now running on a SINGLE sever that is far quieter, with less power consumption (even though it had 14 fans in it!), even though I had to give up a bit of memory (I wasn't using it anyway).  My storage is redundant, but if the server exploded I'd be down a day or two while I built a new one.  Also, I'll be putting these servers at my datacenter at work soon, and will move the site back over to them (and their gigabit+ internet connection) so eventually the site will be much faster.

So what does this mean for the site?  Ummm... absolutely nothing.  However I do have the new forum software also installed on it, and will be launching it soon.

Now, onto Battletech stuff!

First, my old MUL_QS application I wrote a long time ago that used the API that Skyhigh had added is now defunt with their new updates, and the application basically doesn't work anymore.  I could probably make it work with my database instead, but I think time would better be spent just making a simple website that showed you the QS cards all by themselves, easily viewable on phones and stuff.  Chime in if you disagree and I'll rethink it.

Next, a couple new products.  First was a PDF of the FedCom Civil War.  I bought it, as the version I downloaded long ago kinda sucked.  Guess what, so does the new one.  Just crap.  Total waste of money.  Ugh.

However, they also finally released TRO 3067 Unabridged!  I know lots of people were really anxious for this, there is a total of about 315 units in it.  The designs are always, well, new designs that people could make themselves. It'll take me a week or two to get them all entered into the database for ya, but they will all be there soon.

There is a new Interstellar Operations beta thing out, a force generator.  I perused it, and thought it totally sucked.  It wasn't quite a mercenary unit generator, and wasn't nearly as good as what was already in Strategic Operations.  I have no idea what it is supposed to be used for.

I still read the official forums as I still have some accounts on there, but I've ceased posting entirely.  It really seems their forums kinda suck and the topics the epitome of lame.  Even if I was never banned, the only even remotely useful forums anymore seem to be the errata ones, although they accept errata, they never say its confirmed or update the PDFs, which is amazing.

I get the feeling the BT community is just dying, more and more every day.  I love the whole universe, but the game... well, I think I'd rather play 40K or anything with counters.

Somebody mentioned that I should just do my own miniatures based rules system.  While I've thought about something like that before, it is just a lot of work and I'm pretty sure I'm already making more money than I could doing a board game system.  Computers are the future, and that is something that CGL just hasn't quite been able to grasp.  Old non-tech people probably, its common among games like this.